Reading list for Thu, Jan.18, 2024

Cheating is All You Need

There is something legendary and historic happening in software engineering, right now as we speak, and yet most of you don’t realize at all how big it is. ... (24771 chars. See body)

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Heya. Sorry for not writing for so long. I’ll make up for it with 3000 pages here.

I’m just hopping right now. That’s kinda the only way to get me to blog anymore.

I’ve rewritten this post so many times. It’s about AI. But AI is changing so fast that the post is out of date within a few days. So screw it. I’m busting this version out in one sitting.

(Spoiler alert: There’s some Sourcegraph stuff at the end, including a product plug and some recruiting stuff. But >80% of this post is just about LLMs–GPT etc.–and you, a programmer.)

There is something legendary and historic happening in software engineering, right now as we speak, and yet most of you don’t realize at all how big it is.

LLMs aren’t just the biggest change since social, mobile, or cloud–they’re the biggest thing since the World Wide Web. And on the coding front, they’re the biggest thing since IDEs and Stack Overflow, and may well eclipse them both.

But most of the engineers I personally know are sort of squinting at it and thinking, “Is this another crypto?” Even the devs at Sourcegraph are skeptical. I mean, what engineer isn’t. Being skeptical is a survival skill.

Remember I told you how my Amazon shares would have been worth $130 million USD today if I hadn’t been such a skeptic about how big Amazon was going to get, and unloaded them all back in 2004-ish. Right? I told you about that? I’m sure I mentioned it once or twice. Not that I am bitter. No.

But did I ever tell you about the time AWS was just a demo on some engineer’s laptop? No? Well it was Ruben Ortega and Al Vermeulen. They were walking around the eng department at Amazon, showing their “web service” demo to anyone who’d watch it. This was back in maybe… 2003? Ish? They showed us how you could make a service call over the web, like by hitting a URL and sending the right query parameters.

Well lo and behold we were skeptical. Why the hell would you make a service call over the web? That’s not what it was even designed for! Not to mention, it obviously wouldn’t perform as well as CORBA (Amazon’s stupid-ass RPC system at the time). The whole thing just didn’t make any sense to us.

We were seeing the first little flecks of lava from what would become a trillion-dollar volcano of money called AWS and Cloud Computing.

But a lot of us were skeptical. To most of us, those little lava flecks looked like fireflies.

The ultra-rare trillion-dollar money volcano

I could tell you a LOT of stories like the web-services one. Great big shit always starts life as a demo.

What about chatting with people in a browser? Doesn’t matter whether you’re using Facebook, Google Chat, LinkedIn, or just chatting with a customer service agent: if you’re having a conversation with someone in a browser, all that shit started life as a teeny demo of 2 engineers sending messages back and forth over a “hanging GET” channel back in 2005. Entire industries were built on that one little channel, and it wasn’t even very good.

What about Kubernetes? I remember seeing a demo of that early on, on Brendan Burns’ work laptop, when it was called mini-Borg. Entire industries are being built on Kubernetes, and it’s not even very good either. 😉 Or look at Docker! Something as innocuous as linux cgroups, a little process-isolation manager, became the technical foundation for containers, which now utterly pervade our industry.

If you can build something as big as Amazon Web Services with a stack based on a simple service call, or whole social networks and customer service suites based on simple browser-to-browser communication, or a robust way of delivering and managing software based on a little process isolation code, then just imagine how big a thing you could build – bear with me here – if you had the goddamn Singularity as your starting point?

I mean, I joke, but… I mean… Right? I’m guessing you prolly missed it in OpenAI’s 98-page GPT-4 technical report, but large models are apparently already prone to discovering that “power-seeking” is an effective strategy for increasing their own robustness. Open the PDF and search for “power-seeking” for a fun and totally 100% non-scary read.

You can build truly massive things by building upon little technical breakthroughs.

And folks, this technical breakthrough? It ain’t little.

If you’re not pant-peeingly excited and worried about this yet, well… you should be.

And yet the Mehs prevail

We did an internal poll at Sourcegraph: Do you have positive sentiment or negative sentiment about LLMs for coding? Options were Positive, Negative, and Meh. And lo, it was about ⅔ Meh or Negative (i.e., Skeptics), which I suspect is fairly representative of the whole industry.

I asked around, and even as of a couple weeks ago, some devs questioned whether ChatGPT could even write working code, let alone write a full program by simply by telling it to write it.

So here I am, talking about money volcanoes, and my coworkers have formed a huge whirling meh-nado. Which natural disaster should you believe?

Well I mean, I guess a demo is worth a thousand mehs. Let’s try it out.

ChatGPT vs Emacs

Let’s have ChatGPT write some Emacs-Lisp code. I’m picking emacs-lisp because it’s a corner case language, bit of a stress test for the LLM, and because it’s easy for me to try it out interactively.

OK. I just typed this prompt into ChatGPT:

> Write an interactive emacs-lisp function that pops to a new buffer, prints out the first paragraph of "A tale of two cities", and changes all words with 'i' in them red. Just print the code without explanation.

Here’s the code it spat out, if you can’t read the screenshot:

(defun display-tale-of-two-cities ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((text "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,
  it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
  it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was
  the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all
  going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so
  far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being
  received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."))
    (pop-to-buffer "*A Tale of Two Cities*")
    (erase-buffer)
    (insert text)
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "\\b\\w*\\i\\w*\\b" nil t)
      (add-text-properties
       (match-beginning 0) (match-end 0)
       '(face (:foreground "red"))))))

I copied this code directly into my Emacs session and ran it, and it did exactly what I asked it to do:

As you can see from the screenshot, I ran the command and it opened a buffer, printed the requested text, and then turned all the words containing ‘i’ red.

In one shot, ChatGPT has produced completely working code from a sloppy English description! With voice input wired up, I could have written this program by asking my computer to do it.

And not only does it work correctly, the code that it wrote is actually pretty decent emacs-lisp code. It’s not complicated, sure. But it’s good code.

Of course people have done much, much fancier things than this. Someone wrote a product description on a napkin, took a picture, and GPT wrote a working web app that implements the product description on the napkin in the picture. The amount of power here is honestly unknown; it’s more like a cavern that we haven’t fully explored. And it just gets deeper as the LLMs get bigger.

I mean, this stuff is unbelievably powerful. And yet I am persistently met with a mixture of disbelief and pearl-clutching. Argh, the pearl-clutching! Don’t even get me started on the pearl-clutching. Oh look, now you’ve got me started.

Okay, you asked for it.

Whining about Trust Issues

<Rant mode fully engaged>

One of the craziest damned things I hear devs say about LLM-based coding help is that they can’t “trust” the code that it writes, because it “might have bugs in it”.

Ah me, these crazy crazy devs.

Can you trust code you yeeted over from Stack Overflow? NO!

Can you trust code you copied from somewhere else in your code base? NO!

Can you trust code you just now wrote carefully by hand, yourself? NOOOO!

All you crazy MFs are completely overlooking the fact that software engineering exists as a discipline because you cannot EVER under any circumstances TRUST CODE. That’s why we have reviewers. And linters. And debuggers. And unit tests. And integration tests. And staging environments. And runbooks. And all of goddamned Operational Excellence. And security checkers, and compliance scanners, and on, and on and on!

So the next one of you to complain that “you can’t trust LLM code” gets a little badge that says “Welcome to engineering motherfucker”. You’ve finally learned the secret of the trade: Don’t. Trust. Anything!

Peeps, let’s do some really simple back-of-envelope math. Trust me, it won’t be difficult math.

• You get the LLM to draft some code for you that’s 80% complete/correct.
• You tweak the last 20% by hand.

How much of a productivity increase is that? Well jeepers, if you’re only doing 1/5th the work, then you are… punches buttons on calculator watch… five times as productive. 😲

When was the last time you got a 5x productivity boost from anything that didn’t involve some sort of chemicals?

I’m serious. I just don’t get people. How can you not appreciate the historic change happening right now?

OK time to get concrete. I’m already on page 7, and my last attempt at this blog ran 25+ pages and languished for weeks.

Let’s finish this.

<Rant mode disengaged... but lurking>

A Brief Mini-History of LLMs

OK sooooo… this is the part that went on for 20 pages before, so let’s just make it reeeeeal simple. One paragraph.

Here is everything you need to know about the history of LLMs, for our purposes today:

The Google Brain team published a paper in 2017 called Attention is All You Need. It introduced the now-famous Transformer architecture that you see to the left. Everyone uses this now. It replaced ~everything in AI. Google did absolutely nothing with this invention, opting for violent knee-jerking later, as per their usual M.O. Meanwhile, others started training massive Transformers on obscene amounts of data. They began calling them Large Language Models (LLMs). OpenAI came along with ChatGPT on November 30th 2022, the first LLM-based chatbot, missing out on an obvious opportunity to call it Large Marge. Why did they not do this. Ever since then has been full batshit insanity, with new LLM-based products launching daily and technical advances happening every few hours. It’s impossible to track it all. Money Volcano Alert: First lava flecks detected.

Congrats, you’re all caught up on the history of LLMs. Go watch this amazing video for how to implement it in Python.

A brief introduction to Coding Assistants

OK now we can talk coding assistants. They’re just a thing that sits in your IDE and they talk to the LLM for you.

Depending on the particular assistant, they can read and explain code, document code, write code, autocomplete it, diagnose issues, and even perform arbitrary IDE tasks through “agents” that give the LLM robotic powers, including the ability to wield and target laser guns, if someone wants to put in the work. Some assistants also understand your project environment and can answer questions about build targets, branches, your IDE, etc.

So, already pretty cool. Right?

But now they are beginning to be able to perform more complex tasks, such as generating a PR from the diffs on the current branch, including a detailed commit message summarizing the changes.

Some assistants have a conversational/chat interface, too. This kind can do everything a bot like ChatGPT can do, like drafting emails, or answering random questions about the code base or the environment.

I personally prefer a coding assistant with a chat interface. In part because I can type, but also because it makes them a platform. I can build my own workflows. Bonus points if they expose the underlying platform bits with APIs.

I guess the simplest way to think about it would be a sort of “real-time in-IDE Stack Overflow” coupled with a really powerful new set of boilerplate automation tasks.

OK, congrats again – you’re up to speed on what LLM-based coding assistants can do. It’s… pretty much anything. You could hook it up to outbound email and tell it to sell itself. Sky’s the limit. At this point we’re more limited by imagination than by technology.

So! Yeah. Coding assistants. I hope by now you get how powerful they’re going to be. They may take different shapes and forms, but they’re all going to be incredibly badass before very much longer.

Let’s dig a little into how they understand your personal code, and then we’re ready to party. 🎉

Training/fine-tuning vs Search

LLMs are trained on an absolutely staggering amount of data… but that doesn’t include your code.

There are two basic approaches to making the LLM smarter about your code. The first is to fine-tune (or train) on your code. This is not a business model that has been fully fleshed out yet, but it’s coming. And importantly it’s only part of the picture.

The other way is to bring in a search engine. You can think of it as three related scenarios:

• A raw LLM is like a Harvard CS grad who knows a lot about coding and took a magic mushroom about 4 hours ago, so it’s mostly worn off, but not totally.
• Fine-tuning it on your code base is like having it study your code carefully, which means it will give better answers in general.
• Incorporating a search engine, much like for humans, makes the AI even more effective, because it can answer direct queries very quickly. And importantly, because the search engine can be used to populate the query context.
  • Meaning, a search engine can be useful twice per query – once when figuring out how to describe and contextualize the query, and again potentially when answering the query.

You talk to LLMs by sending them an action or query, plus some relevant context. So for instance, if you want it to write a unit test for a function, then you need to pass along that whole function, along with any other relevant code (e.g. test-fixture code) so that it gets the test right.

That context you send over is called the context window, and I think of it as the “cheat sheet” of information that you pass along as part of your query.

And folks, it ain’t much. It’s almost exactly like a 2-sided index card vs your whole textbook, for an exam. They give you between 4k and 32k tokens of 3-4 characters each, so at best, maybe 100k of text, to input into the LLM as context for your query. That 100k cheat sheet is how you tell the LLM about your code.

In an ideal world, you’d just pass your entire code base in with each query. In fact, Jay Hack just tweeted a graph showing how the latest context window size in GPT-4 compares to some popular code bases:

Which is kind of exciting… until you realize that it’s still just incredibly tiny compared to real-world code bases. It’s an index card vs a textbook… just a slightly bigger index card.

That cheat sheet is all you get. That’s how you talk to an LLM. You pass it a cheat sheet.

Which means what goes ON that cheat sheet, as you can probably imagine, is really really important.

And with that, friends, we are finally ready for the punchline, the party, and the demo.

You made it!

Cheating is All You Need

There are, by my last count, approximately 13 hillion frillion jillion LLM-backed coding assistants out there, as of mid-March. But they are all in a desperate race to the bottom, because they’re all using the exact same raw materials: An LLM, your IDE, your code base, and that pesky little context window.

Nobody can differentiate on the LLM; they’re all about the same. And the IDE and your code base are the same. All they can try to differentiate on is their UI and workflows, which they’re all going to copy off each other. Good for you, bad for them.

The punchline, and it’s honestly one of the hardest things to explain, so I’m going the faith-based route today, is that all the winners in the AI space will have data moats.

A “data moat” is, in a nutshell, having access to some data that others do not have access to.

You need a data moat to differentiate yourself in the LLM world.

Why? Because the data moat is how you populate the context window (“cheat sheet”).

If you can’t feed the LLM your whole code base, and you can only show it 100k characters at a time, then you’d better be really goddamn good at fetching the right data to stuff into that 100k-char window. Because that’s the only way to affect the quality of the LLM’s output!

Put another way, you need a sidecar database. The data moat needs to be fast and queryable. This is a Search Problem!

This is true even outside the world of engineering. There are probably 13 hillion jillion killion LLM-based outbound sales products being built like right now, as you’re reading this. But only Salesforce and a few other companies with big data moats are going to be able to differentiate in that space.

Party Time

OK! You’re finally done learning stuff. I’m very proud that you’ve made it to the end.

The rest is a private Sourcegraph party. I mean, you can come along if you like, because you’re a friend. I’ll slip you by the door guy.

You’ve just graduated from Stevey’s LLM Mini-U, and you have all the necessary theoretical background to appreciate why I feel I am the luckiest damn person on Earth, and why I’m throwing a party, right here on page two thousand eight hundred and ninety six of this blog post.

Because folks, I honestly don’t know how I got so lucky. I joined Sourcegraph in September, not half so much for their product itself as for their Code Intelligence Platform, which was like the one I built back at Google. They’d nearly finished building v1 of this platform and it was ready to start powering something amazing.

And then LLMs landed 10 weeks after I joined. The Singularity, the Cloverfield monster stomping around eating people, and everything else that’s happened since November 30th. Crazy town.

And what do LLMs need again? You, in the front row. Yeah, you.

They need the data moat! The sidecar database. For populating the cheat sheet. Remember?

It’s a Search problem. And Sourcegraph has spent the past ten years building the solution.

Go figure.

Sourcegraph’s platform has four enduring, difficult-to-reproduce dimensions that are incredibly relevant to the coding-assistant space:

• It’s universal and works across all code hosts and platforms.
• It’s scalable and ready for enterprises of all sizes.
• It’s precise and comparable to IDEs in its accuracy and completeness.
• It’s open and is being developed openly and transparently.

Sourcegraph’s engine powers gigantic enterprises with literally a hundred thousand git repositories, and/or multi-terabyte massive megarepos that make IDEs fall over and puke. And at its core is an engine so powerful that maybe teaming up with an AI was its destiny all along.

Whoo boy. Did I get lucky? I think I got pretty lucky. We have such an incredible head-start in this race.

When I say “We’re building a coding assistant”, I want you to think back to when Ruben Ortega showed us Amazonians his little demo of a remote procedure call over HTTP. That was Baby AWS.

Now take a look at what my esteemed colleague and Sourcegraph teammate Dominic Cooney slacked me last week:

In other news, I am getting even more enthusiastic. There is more, much more, to this space than LLMs and I think we have the embryonic stage of some amazing invention here. Like some realizations that context provisioning is a service. That the output has streams, like one into the editor and one into the chat. That the LLM benefits from the opportunity to self criticize. That the UX needs diffs and in-situ things to home in on things. That search is as big a deal as chat. Many of our thumbs down reactions to [LLMs] come from them complaining they didn't have the context of what language, file, codebase, etc. the user is talking about. Which bodes well because Sourcegraph should be able to do that really well.

He’s glimpsed the future, and it’s vast. His comment, “I think we have the embryonic stage of some amazing invention here”, reminded me of all the embryonic stages I’ve seen of other eventually-amazing things: The Mosaic web browser. The mini-Borg demo that became Kubernetes. The Amazon web-services demo. The hanging-GET request in the browser.

Little things grow up, folks!

I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends. This volcano is the big one. Skeptics beware. At the very least, I hope by now you’re taking LLM-backed coding assistants in general just a teeny bit more seriously than you were an hour ago.

OK, you’ve heard the punchline, and the party’s in full swing. Lemme show you Cody and we’ll call it a day.

A whirlwind tour of Sourcegraph’s Cody

Say hi to Cody:

Cody is Sourcegraph’s new LLM-backed coding assistant. Cody knows about your code. It has templated actions, such as writing unit tests, generating doc comments, summarizing code, that kind of thing. You know. Stuff you can choose from a menu. Like other assistants. It even has code completions, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Cody is not some vague “representation of a vision for the future of AI”. You can try it right now.

And it has a chat interface! Which means it’s totally open-ended; you can ask it any question at all about your code base or your environment, and we’ll send it the right cheat sheet. And Cody itself is a platform, because you can use it to build your own LLM-backed workflows.

My favorite kind. Naturally.

Currently Cody is a VSCode plugin, though we’ll have it in other places soon enough.

Cody scales up to the very biggest code bases in the world. And even though Cody is still a baby, just like Baby AWS back on Ruben’s stinkpad in 2003, it’s already able to lift a huge space rhino using only the power of the Force. Hang on, sorry wrong baby.

Ahem. As I was saying, like Baby AWS, Cody is also a baby with special powers, and honestly… we don’t know how powerful it’s going to get. It seems to be accelerating, if anything.

Oh, and anyone can sign up to get access start using Cody now. (Edited after Cody was released.)

OK so anyway here’s how Cody works:

Here’s the diagram above, in a nutshell:

• You ask Cody to do something (for instance, “write a unit test for this function”)
• Cody populates the cheat sheet / context window query using Sourcegraph’s code intelligence platform (search queries, embeddings retrievals, graphql queries, etc)
• It sends the context+query to the LLM, and parses the results
• It optionally inserts the results back into the IDE (depending on the action)

And of course this is all just the veeeery beginning. This thing will grow into a goliath that enhances everything you do as an engineer.

Other coding assistants, which do not have Sourcegraph for Step 2 (populating the context), are stuck using whatever context they can get from the IDE. But sadly for them, IDEs weren’t really designed with this use case in mind, and they make it difficult. And more damningly, no IDE scales up to industrial-sized code bases.

So it’s just plain unfair. I’m just gonna call it like it is. Sourcegraph has an absolutely unfair advantage, which they built up over ten years of building out this incredibly scalable, precise, and comprehensive code intelligence platform, powered by a world-class search engine and code knowledge graph.

Did I mention I’m lucky? I’m so fortunate to be here, and grateful to be part of this team.

Afterlogue

I don’t really know how to finish this post. Are we there yet? I’ve tried to write this thing 3 times now, and it looks like I may have finally made it. I aimed for 5 pages, deliberately under-explained everything, and it’s… fifteen. Sigh.

But hopefully you got the main takeaways. Baby AWS. Knee jerking. Meh-nadoes. Cheat sheets. Data moats. Cody. You got this!

LLMs aren’t some dumb fad, like crypto. Yes, crypto was a dumb fad. This is not that.

Coding assistants are coming. They’re imminent. You will use them this year. They will absolutely blow your mind. And they’ll continue to improve at an astonishing rate.

They will feel gloriously like cheating, just like when IDEs came out, back in the days of yore. And for a time-constrained developer like me–and I say this as someone who has written over a million lines of production code…

Cheating is all you need.

Thanks for reading, and if you like, come be our Head of AI! Or come do something else with us! It’s pretty merry around here already, but the more, the merrier.

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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (199) | logout Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award (acm.org) 831 points by robbiet480 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 229 comments ... (81449 chars. See body)

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Bob has been an active member of the Austin startup community for 10+ years and I've talked with him many times. As a EE, it was cool meeting him the first time and once I'd chatted with him a few times, I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask: How'd you come up with "Metcalfe's Law"? Metcalfe's Law states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of devices of the system. When I finally asked him, he looked at me and said "I made it up." Me: .. what? Him: I was selling network cards and I wanted people to buy more. Me: .. what? Him: If I could convince someone to buy 4 instead of 2, that was great. So I told them buying more made each of them more valuable. It was mind blowing because so many other things were built on that "law" that began as a sales pitch. Lots of people have proven out "more nodes are more valuable" but that's where it started. He also tells a story about declining a job with Steve Jobs to start 3Com and Steve later coming to his wedding. He also shared a scan of his original pitch deck for 3Com which was a set of transparencies because Powerpoint hadn't been invented yet. I think I kept a copy of it..

Btw, when I say "an active member of the Austin startup community" - I mean that seriously. Not only did he teach a class on startups at the University of Texas but regularly came to a coffee meetup for years, attended Startup Weekend demo time, came to Techstars Demo Day, and was generally present. I even got to do the Twilio 5 Minute Demo for one of his classes (circa 2012). It was always cool to have someone who shaped our industry just hanging out and chatting with people.

Absolutely correct. Chatted with him several times circa 2015 to 2016 when working out of Capital Factory in Austin. He was present for all sorts of event such as mentor hours, startup pitches, etc. Funnily enough, he would give you a very stern look if he thought you were taking him for a ride. Have not been there recently as as much as I would like, but I imagine he is still around to be found.

Had a very similar experience hanging out with him and his equally-brilliant wife Robyn in ATX between 2011-2012. Very approachable guy -- impressively so, given his stature in the industry -- but could be quick with the "what the hell are you talking about?" look.

I respect Metcalfe a lot, but halfway through undergraduate discrete math it was pretty obvious to most people in the class even before seeing a formal proof that a fully connected graph has O(n^2) edges. I just figured that people wowed by "Metcalfe's Law" were business types who didn't any formal theory into computing.

Yeah, but basically it’s a statement that value scales linearly with the number of pairwise connection.

but it's a loose approximation so it's not good to overanalyze it. The number of pairwise connections grows as the number of pairwise connections, and connections ("how many people can you talk to") are valuable, so value grows. But individual connections to networks grow the pairwise connections by N, so that's even better. broadcast (one to many connections, like giving a speech to a crowd) is an efficiency hack, which is good, and efficiency hacks grow as the number of connections grow, so that's good too... ... is more how I think about what Metcalfe was talking about. Which aspects are x, which are x squared, which are log x is interesting, but that's not all bound up in his simple statment, despite his "as the square" wording. and Bob Metcalfe is personally a great guy in all the ways people are saying, but it's not soooo unique, that's the way a lot of tech types were as the mantle passed from the Greatest Generation to the Boomers (and what was that one in the middle, "lost" or "invisible" or something) I'm not suggesting we've lost that (we may have) just saying that's how it was, for instance as an undergrad you could walk into any professor's office and get serious attention.

Only two? The gravity law argument based on geographic distribution of traffic, Zipf's Law and Bradford's law all have empirical evidence behind them. That's three. Additionally another version of the same paper Bob Briscoe contributed data from British Telecom usage that supported the same scaling rule. The second paper that you gave is interesting. Odlyzko was the one who contributed that particular argument. It is right that there are rational reasons to not interconnect. But Metcalfe would imply more of a first mover advantage than we actually see. In social networks we had Friendster, MySpace and Facebook, each of which overtook the other. How could a new entrant supplant the king? Not once, but twice? Since then new social networks have continued to sprout and succeed. Facebook managed to stay on top, in part through purchasing other networks. One of which (Instagram) is on track to surpass Facebook in revenue. Now let's look at the 4 papers that you collected. The first and third have the same flaw. They are looking at revenue over time as the network grew. But the growth of the network is not the only change that happened over time. 1. The Facebook product improved to become more compelling, even for the same users. In part by adding new channels through purchasing other networks. 2. Facebook kept adding new ways to monetize people, improving revenue. 3. People's behavior has shifted to more online over time. Thus it was easier to get value from the same users in 2014 than in 2008. Because so much has changed, comparing users in 2008 to users in 2014 is not apples to apples. Next, let's turn to the last paper. I'm in agreement with patio11 that Bitcoin's valuation has been driven by the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Therefore I view most of its valuation as fake. And so am not inclined to accept arguments from that valuation as valid. And I saved the best for last. In section 2.4 the EU paper argues that Briscoe's law (I think Odlyzko should be credited, but Bob Briscoe is in the EU) is more accurate than Metcalfe's law after you hit scale. Their argument in effect is a variant of one that was discussed privately before we wrote our paper. Our immediate perception of the size of a network is based on how much of our personal social groups are on it. The value we get from that network is based on the same. Therefore our perception of the size of the network is correlated with the value we get from it. If the network mostly contains parts of groups, you do get something like Metcalfe's Law out of this. But once the network contains a lot of completed social groups, members of those groups slow down how much value they gain as the network continues to grow. In other words when the connections in the network are a random sampling of the connections that matter to us, growing the network adds valuable connections. Once the network contains the connections that we know matters to us, most of us only benefit marginally from continued growth.

Was it not specifically "compatibly communicating devices" or something and not users like how it was marketed.

well, according to Alonzo Church, if this is x squared and that is x squared, then this is that.

(n²-n)/2 is O(n²) as GP claimed (not that it's exactly n², unless edited before I saw it), you're both right.

HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing

It's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18 months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hold for ten years. However reality kept up with this prediction for far longer than anticipated until the physical limits of silicon miniaturization became apparent in recent (ish) years, until the mid 00's (maybe later?).

I think it technically kept going into the early 2010s due to additional advancements and technically it hasn’t yet stopped but people are generally skeptical that TSMC and Samsung can keep this party going (a party that seems to have stopped for Intel itself apparently). Dennard scaling though did end in the mid 00s and this impacted Koomey’s law which talks about performance/watt and saw a similar petering out. Apparently the bound at even a conservative rate puts the thermodynamic doubling limit at 2080. After that we’ll have to really hope smart people have figured out how to make reversible computing a thing.

CPU clock speed stopped improving slightly sooner than that. Performance continued to improve, but they switched from making single threaded code faster to adding more cores. This was a bit of a bummer for programmers working in single threaded languages who found that their code stopped getting faster for free.

lots of (not only european) public funding made progress to euv of asml, zeiss and other possible.

Sorta. It didn't hit a hard boundary per se, but SRAM has practically stopped scaling and even random logic is only scaling at about 1.5x every three years or so. Like a lot of cases it's an s-curve, and we're on the other side of the bend at this point.

Moore's law is almost the opposite of Metcalfe's - Metcalfe's encourages you to build out the network as fast as possible to get the most value; Moore's implies you should wait as long as possible before buying processing power to get the most you can.

Moore’s law isn’t even dead. It says that the number of transistors per dollar rises at that rate, which is still going. Commenters tend to omit the cost component of Moore’s remark.

CS "laws" like Metcalfe's are closer to Murphy's Law than Newton's...

> Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. variance/standard deviation (also btw, a sum of squares concept) it marks the inflection points on the gaussian curves, but so what, the 2nd derivative points to something significant about the integral? not really. But even if we accept that it does, what does two standard deviations mean? a linear double on the x coordinates says what about the a hairy population density function? nothing. or similar to Metcalfe's Law, the very widely used Herfindahl Index (also squares!). It's a cross between a hash and a compression, it says something about the original numbers, but wildly different scenarios can collide.

When observation is translated to "law". That is an act of judgment on the part of the law-maker, purely. Call it "built on nothing" if you like. But as opposed to what?

"IF proven incorrect" is the important part. This "law" isn't somehow less true just because it was originally used as a sales tactic.

The law implies testable consequences, such as what the economic incentives should be from interconnecting networks. They are good enough that we should expect to see more drive to interconnect, and stronger barriers to entry for future networks, than history actually shows. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf offers this and several other lines of evidence that the law is wrong, and O(n log(n)) is a more accurate scaling law.

It is quite telling that when Bob Metcalfe 'makes stuff up' he still hits it out of the park.

A little confirmation bias on this one. In addition to the infamous internet will collapse prediction he was also pretty whole hog on the Segway scooter revolutionizing transit.

So let me enlighten you a bit: we did collapse the internet, and got a testy email from a bunch of backbone maintainers that they were going to block our live video streams (on port 2047) in four weeks time or so. Which resulted in us moving to the other side of the Atlantic to relieve the transatlantic cable. So even if it didn't make the news Metcalfe was 100% on the money on that particular prediction. The Segway never had a chance as far as I'm concerned but the other thing he got just so. But maybe he never knew (and I never knew about his bet).

He made a very specific prediction - it didn’t pan out - that there have been near misses and even global degradation events multiple times in the past 3 decades is not relevant. He admitted he was wrong and literally ate his words.

> But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. - Bob Metcalfe

From the paper: > In general, connections are not used with the same intensity... so assigning equal value to them is not justified. This is the basic objection to Metcalfe’s Law... In my architectonic opinion, the perfect network comprises all nodes operating equally. Ergo the ideal is indeed Metcalfe's law, but architecture and design can be costly, which is simple the inefficient use of resources. These being very precise machines, anything less than 99.999% is amateur, ergo the law obtains.

We are talking about computer systems that connect a network of humans. Humans are notoriously imprecise and unreliable machines. Anything more than 0.00001% is therefore a miracle.

Lol, networking people has produced little of real value except the paradigm itself, and social networking is little more than making humans more efficient at marketing to each other. Networking is for DATA. When people behave like networked machines... well that's global capital communism tbqh.

I remember trying to get NICs to work in Linux and the best advice was usually “just try the 3c509 driver”.

I remember when I bought my first fast ethernet card, there was some Linux HOWTO that discussed various ethernet NIC's, and crucially, their Linux drivers in excruciating detail. And the takeaway was that if you had a choice, pick either 3com 5xx(?) or Intel card. The 3com card was slightly cheaper at the local computer shop, so that's what I ended up with (595 Vortex, maybe?).

Yeah, I had gold-plated 100Mb 3Com cards and they were the best. (something-905-series?) With full-duplex, hardware offloading, good drivers. I still have one lying somewhere. )

As a poor college student I scavenged 3c509 cards to build a computer network in an apartment I shared with two other chronic internet users. That was right about the time someone has solved a bug with certain revisions of the card behaving differently. So suddenly the availability jumped considerably.

It was well known when I started that you got a card that would work with that (and later for gigabit it was e1000).

Although he made it up, there's an argument that the value goes up more than linearly. But as the network grows, every node doesn't necessarily need to talk to every other node except in rare circumstances, or they can reach each other through an intermediate point. So maybe O(n log n) would be closer.

I recall seeing an article a number of years ago that argued just that. That the network effect is nlogn. Still enough to help explain why large networks grow larger, but it also means that overcoming the incumbent is not the insurmountable wall it may seem to be. You may only need to work twice as hard to catch up, rather than orders of magnitude harder.

He may have "made it up" to improve sales, but from a certain viewpoint it's correct. If decide to measure the "value" of a network based on the number of node connections, then the number of connections for n nodes is n(n-1)/2 = 0.5n^2 - 0.5n which is O(n^2). Of course, the value of something is hard to measure. Typically you measure value as "benefits - costs", and try to convert everything to a currency. E.g., see: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-benefitanalysis.as... . But there are often many unknowns, as well as intangible benefits and costs. That make that process - which seems rigorous at first - a lot harder to do in reality. So while he may have "made it up" on the spot, he had a deep understanding of networking, and I'm sure he knew that the number of connections is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. So I suspect his intuition grabbed a quick way to estimate value, using what he knew about connection growth. Sure, it's nowhere near as rigorous as "benefits - costs", but that is hard to really measure, and many decisions simply need adequate enough information to make a reasonable decision. In which case, he both "made it up" and made a claim that you can justify mathematically.

And yet it's trivially true. Value accrues with connectivity, which is number of the edges in a fully connected graph being n(n-1)/2, which as n grows larger approximates to n^2. I would be surprised he said he "made it up", other than as a joke about elementary computer science.

As n grows larger, the number of edges approximates n²/2. I may be pedantic but I feel that the difference between something and it's half is non-negligible.

You're assuming complete connectivity; no one builds networks of nontrivial size that way.

Well deserved. I remember dealing with a whole raft of other networking technologies and Ethernet stood head-and-shoulders above anything else available at the time. One thing that is not well appreciated today is how power efficient Ethernet was, even on launch in the coax era. Other network technologies (Token Ring as embodied by IBMs network cards, for instance) consumed power like there was no tomorrow. Leading to someone quipping renaming it to 'smoking thing'. As the price came down (around the NE1000/2000 and 3C509 era) it suddenly was everywhere and economies of scale wiped out the competition until WiFi came along. But even today - and as I'm writing this on my ethernet connected laptop - I prefer wired networks to wireless ones. They seem more reliable to me and throughput is constant rather than spotty, which weighs heavier to me than convenience. So thank you Bob Metcalfe, I actually think this award is a bit late. Anybody remember Don Becker?

I had no idea that Token Ring was inefficient with power, but it certainly had a bunch of other problems. Biggest (at least on PCs) was its inability to recover from a cable being unplugged without resetting a bunch of the system, and the type-1 token ring cables win the award for being the most needlessly bulky,[1] even if the connectors had a plug-into-each-other party trick. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...

I still have a soft spot in my heart for ARCNet. In the 80s it was cheaper than ethernet, but more reliable than token ring. And for the few places that prioritized determinism over throughput, it was indispensable. But ethernet kept improving speed and reliability while ARCnet retreated to shop-floor niche applications. Alas.

ARCNet was nice, except for when people decided randomly to remove the terminator off the t-connector on the back of their desktop because "it looked weird" and thus taking down the whole network. That happened to me more than once doing network support in college.

ARCNet is mentioned heavily in The Big Bucks. I have to admit that I knew very little about it before doing research for the book.

One more book on the stack... Now I have to read it to find out how ARCNet worms it's way into a novel about sili valley.

This part's not in the book: Gordon Peterson, the architect of ARCNet, was a major source for me. He talked to Bob back in the day. Gordon's still bitter about it, and will gladly tell you why Ethernet is inferior.

Ethernet is one of those case studies in "worse is better". I remember the old saying that "Ethernet doesn't work in theory, but it does in practice". Mostly referring to the CSMA/CD scheme used before switches took over. The competitive advantage of being built out of cheap commodity hardware and cabling is hard to overstate. Nobody likes dealing with vendors, their salespeople, and especially support contracts. Especially since that is always more expensive and often solves problems you don't have, like minimum latency guarantees, at the cost of throughput and complexity.

There were a lot of LAN schemes back then. Mostly forgotten now. Many press commentators opined that of course "broadband" would be much better than "baseband" since it could carry voice and video, not just bits.

Agreed. Can't overstate the cost effectiveness. In the late 80s or early 90s you could put hundreds of dumb terminals on one network with just hubs for signal integrity. Plenty of collisions but it all worked itself out somehow if the throughput was light, such as text applications, text email, and a small amount of printing or sharing. This meant every university could have some kind of network scheme, making it a universal for the next gen.

I even put a whole section with that old debate in Inventing the Future (Janet, working at Xerox, is arguing with her husband Ken, who's at Hughes Aircraft): ============== She’d heard that the product Xerox was going to ship was aiming for 20 megabits.1 It was amazing. But, as people at Xerox explained, imagine an entire office full of knowledge workers with their own computers, sending documents and email to each other and to the printer. How much bandwidth would they need? A lot! Someone in Palo Alto had done a whiteboard exercise on the bandwidth required for teleportation, in other words, sending an entire human being through the wire. It wasn’t that they took the prospect of teleportation seriously, but still, it was fun, and she enjoyed being around people who had fun at work. Ken scoffed and insisted that Ethernet would never work. This was a recurring argument with them that was starting to annoy her, although usually she’d just smile and change the subject. He kept hurling the word deterministic as if it were a magic talisman. On the Ethernet, you weren’t certain how long you’d have to wait to transmit your data. If the wire was busy when you wanted to talk, you had to wait. If someone else tried to transmit exactly when you did, you both had to back off and try again. An engineer could give you the probabilities of various results, but no more. This was not real engineering, and Ken was offended by it. He was even offended by the word “ether” since any beginning physics student knows that ether was a bogus concept that was disproven ages ago. The entire communications field that the two of them had studied at MIT was based on strict mathematical calculations and guarantees. For example, when you make a telephone connection, that circuit is yours until you’re done. No other calls interfere with yours. The telephone companies had spent decades perfecting this system, and they had a monopoly. How could any company, even one as big as Xerox, hope to change that? She tried telling him that packet-switching was a real discipline, and the Defense Department itself was backing it. It was originally designed to survive a nuclear attack that destroyed some of the military’s communications lines. With packet switching, the message was broken up into pieces, or packets, and the packets might arrive on separate paths. Ken didn’t believe it would ever have commercial applications. People in aerospace had a low opinion of commercial stuff anyway. 1 The original speed goal for the Xerox Wire was 20 megabits/sec. The first controller, for the Dolphin, had independent send and receive buffers, but could only be made to fit on the board using 10-Mbps CRC chips from Fairchild. Furthermore, in the lab, Tony found that 20-Mbps signaling caused spurious collision detects on the cable due to transceiver tap reflections.

There were a lot of LAN schemes - and slightly incompatible ethernet implementations. I remember when the Interop tradeshow in Vegas required vendors to either attach and integrate with the show network or they would get kicked off the floor. Good times!

Well.. I still want to read the book. I'm a sucker for a well crafted story about old hardware from the days when technology gods walked the earth. I'm sure Ethernet's market domination is because the spec wasn't owned by a single company, and nothing to do with it's technical merits. After IBM's SNA, people seemed paranoid of a networking spec being owned by a single company. Do you know if Datapoint thought about that and whether they tried to build their own equivalent of the DIX consortium? I also think about SpaceWire / IEEE-1355 / Wormhole Routing and what might have been had we adopted systems where compute power could be easily upgraded. Oh! The good old days when everything was possible!

on DataPoint: my hero (sort of) Matt Feingold spends a summer internship at DataPoint. As far as he (and I) could tell, people still thought in terms of "account control" back then. There's actually a book on DataPoint (and almost every other company from way back when). I read them so you don't have to :)

I get the impression that 10BASE-T killed ARCNet, and it was the "T" rather than the "10" that did so. Running cheap CAT-5 to a set of interconnected hubs was just so much easier and more reliable than t-connectors, terminators &c.

Never met Don Becker but as it was the Beowulf project that got me interested in GNU/Linux he is synonymous with ethernet drivers

>They seem more reliable to me and throughput is constant rather than spotty, which weighs heavier to me than convenience. They ARE more reliable. I much rather use ethernet than wifi on desktops and laptop. Now with video meetings, high quality webcams, mics and gaming, latency and bandwith is king. WiFi is usually FAST but it is not as STABLE.

Sure, years ago. But today Ethernet is just as scammy as everyone else, we've been stuck at 1 Gbps on consumer grade hardware for more than 15 years. There are claims (unverified ofc) about their executives boasting about their stupid margins. 1 Gb switch is like 10-20 euros meanwhile 2.5 Gbps is like over 100...

2.5Gb is downshifted 10Gb with the same line coding, just with 1/4 the symbol rate. This means that it inherits all the complexities of 10GbE, while tolerating cheaper connectors and cables. 10GbE uses DSQ128 PAM-16 at 800Msym/s. 2.5G just does quarter-rate at 200Msym/s. 1000BaseT uses trellis coded PAM-5, a significantly less complex modulation. When one factors in the complexity of the line code and all equalisation and other processing in the analog frontend things get expensive. Copper 10Gb interfaces run very hot for a reason. It takes quite a bit of signal processing and tricks to push 10Gb over copper, at least for any significant distances.

It's not really about can handle, but more is specified to handle at maximum length in a dense conduit. At shorter lengths, and in single runs, it's always worth trying something beyond what the wiring jacket says. I've run gigE over a run with a small section of cat3 coupled to a longer cat5e run (repurposed 4-pair phone wire), and just recently setup a 10G segment on a medium length of cat5e. The only thing is while I think 2.5G/5G devices do test for wiring quality, the decimal speeds don't, auto-negotiation happens on the 1Mbps link pulses, unmanaged devices can easily negotiate to speeds that won't work, if your wiring is less than spec, you need to be able to influence negotiation on at least one side, in case it doesn't work out.

I can't make heads or tails of your comment. What is scammy about Ethernet and what 'stupid margins' does Ethernet have? It's a networking standard, not a company.

2.5G or even 10G is not that much more expensive and companies making consumer electronics sell it as a considerable premium for what is essentially the same cost difference as making a 8gb vs 16 gb flash drive. Of course, regular internet users don't need more than 2.5G (and couldn't use it in most of the world due to ISP monopolies) so anything faster than gigabit is a target for segmentation.

The market at work. There is just no real demand for anything beyond 1G. The HN crowd is not representative of what would be needed to drive the price tags down on 2.5G stuff.

If you have a gigabit internet connection, then most of the value of 10G comes from data sharing within the intranet, which just never caught on outside of hobbyists. And a 1G switch can still handle a lot of that, You don’t even need 10G for LAN parties, and whether backups can go faster depends on the storage speed and whether you actually care. Background backups hide a lot of sins. I’m hoping a swing back to on-prem servers will justify higher throughput, but that still may not be the case. You need something big to get people to upgrade aging infrastructure. What would be enough to get people to pay for new cable runs? 20Gb? 40?

Rant aside, I think there is an argument to be made that 2.5gbps switches "should" be cheaper now that 2.5gbps NICs have become fairly commonplace in the mainstream market. Case in point, I have a few recent-purchase machines with 2.5gbps networking but no 2.5gbps switch to connect them to because I personally can't justify their cost yet. I suppose I could bond two 1gbps ports together, or something, but I like to think I have other yaks to shave right now.

You can get some basic switches that do 2.5gb but it's like $100, a bit more for a brand you might recognize. https://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Multi-Gigabit-Unmanaged-Entert... Personally I went with Mikrotik's 10gb switch but that needed SPF port thingies (which was fine for me, as I was connecting one old enterprise switch via fiber, direct copperering two servers, and using cabled cat7 or whatever for the Mac). 2.5gb is silly in my opinion unless it's literally "free" - you're often better with old 10gb equipment.

> 2.5gb is silly in my opinion unless it's literally "free" - you're often better with old 10gb equipment. I think 2.5g is going to make it in the marketplace, because 2.5g switches are finally starting to come down in price, and 10g switches are roughly twice the price, and that might be for sfp+, so you'll likely need transceivers, unless you're close enough for DAC. (NIC prices are also pretty good now, as siblings noted. But if you go with used 10G, you can get good prices there too, I've got 4 dual 10G cards and paid between $25 and $35 shipped for each)

Yeah, it's that cost that is the problem. If I'm paying over a hundred bucks for a switch I might as well go higher and consider 10gbps options. 2.5gbps hardware need to come down to at least the $30 to $40 dollar range if they want to make any sense. Otherwise, they'll stay as niche hardware specifically for diehard enthusiasts or specific professionals only.

The NICs can be had for $20 (pretty sure I saw a $11 one the other day but can't find it right now on mobile).

The NICs are reasonable now, yes. The issue is the thing on the other side of the cable; 2.5gbps switches and routers need to come down in price.

The problem with 2.5G is that it's not enough of an upgrade over 1G to warrant buying all new switches and NICs to get it. For that matter few home users push around enough data for 10G to be a big win. IMHO this is why Ethernet has stalled out at 1G. People still don't have large enough data needs to make it worthwhile. See also: the average storage capacity of new personal computers. It has been stuck around 1TB for ages. Hell, it went down for several years during the SSD transition.

2.5gbps is literally 2.5x times the speed of gigabit ethernet, so that's going to be very noticable even for most home users if they do any amount of LAN file sharing. It's really just the cost that's the problem, because paying 4x to 5x or even 6x times the cost of gigabit hardware for a 2.5x times performance boost doesn't make a lot of sense. If 2.5gbps peripheral hardware costs would come down I will happily bet they will take off.

This assumes that the LAN is the bottleneck. Gigabit ethernet tops out at 120MB/s, which is about the speed of spinning rust on a NAS.

Yeah, but you probably have more than one drive RAID'd in that NAS so you will almost certainly get faster transfers (granted: sequential) if ethernet wasn't the bottleneck. 2.5gbps ethernet translates to roughly 250MB/s in real world transfer speeds, that's a lot. Literally over double real world gigabit transfer speeds, and far less likely to bottleneck you.

But that has nothing to do with Ethernet as such, which isn't a 'company making consumer electronics'.

You are may actually be right, sorry, my rant may have been misguided. "networking standard" doesnt make it free of royalties though, dont/didn't companies pay to use the Wifi protocol?

It's a big loss that wired networking speeds have plateaued but I feel it's more about apps and people adapting to slow and choppy wireless networks that penalise apps leveraging quality connectivity, and stand as bottlenecks in home networks (eg you don't need 10G broadband the wifi will cap everything to slow speeds anyway). And mobile devices that had much smaller screens and memories than computers for a decade+ stalling the demand driven by moore's law.

People buy ethernet for reliable connection and reliable latency (no package drops), and to get 1Gbps. Few consumers have need for more, since internet speeds also rarely exceed 1Gbps. Sure, anyone with a NAS might like more, but that's a tiny market. And tiny markets lack economy of scale, causing prices to be high.

You can have 10G with eg, Mikrotik at a reasonable price. One problem with it is that the copper tech is just power hungry. It may actually make sense to go with fiber, especially if you might want even more later (100G actually can be had at non-insane prices!) Another problem is that it's CPU intensive. It's actually not that hard to run into situations where quite modern hardware can't actually handle the load of dealing with 10G at full speed especially if you want routing, a firewall, or bridging. It turns out Linux bridge interfaces disable a good amount of the acceleration the hardware can provide and can enormously degrade performance, which makes virtualization with good performance a lot trickier.

You can go fast if you don't do anything fancy with the interface. If you say, want bridged networking for your VMs and add your 10G interface to virbr0, poof, a good chunk of your acceleration vanishes right there. Routing and firewalling also cost you a lot. There are ways to deal with this with eg, virtual functions, but the point is that even on modern hardware, 10G can be no longer a foolproof thing to have working at full capacity. You may need to actually do a fair amount of tweaking to have things perform well.

The other issue is that unless your computer is acting as a router or a bridge, you need to do something with that 10GB data stream. SSDs have only recently gotten fast enough to just barely support reading or writing that fast. But even if you do find one that supports writes that fast a 10GbeE card could fill an expensive 4TB drive in less than an hour. Good luck decoding JPEGs and blitting them out to a web browser window that fast.

>10GB data stream. SSDs have only recently gotten fast enough to just barely support reading or writing that fast. 10gbps (gigabits per second) is not 10GB/s (gigabytes per second). Specifically, 10gbps is approximately 1.25GB/s or 1250MB/s.

Consumer SSDs used to max out at about 550MB/s, some still do. You need a larger and more modern drive to do 1.25GB/s sustained write. Even then buffering can get you.

That's due to the communication protocol. 2.5 inch and M.2 SATA SSDs max out around 550MB/s due to the limits of SATA3 connections which cap out at 6gbps. M.2 NVME SSDs meanwhile communicate over PCIE, generally using four lanes, and the latest PCIE5 SSDs can do around 15GB/s if I recall. PCIE4 drives can get up to around 7GB/s, and PCIE3 drives up to around 3GB/s. Other potential bottlenecks can occur with the motherboard chipset, controller, and NAND flash, but details. TL;DR: Any NVME SSD can saturate a 10gbps ethernet connection.

TCP/IP offload isn’t the issue. The core problem is that the Linux kernel uses interrupts for handling packets. This limits Linux networking performance in terms of packets per second. The limit is about a million packets per second per core. For reference 10GE is about 16 million packets per second at line rate using small packets. This is why you have to use kernel bypass software in user space to get linerate performance above 10G in Linux. Popular software for this use case utilize DPDK, XDP or VPP.

You don't need an interrupt per packet, at least not with sensible NICs and OSes. Something like 10k interrupts per second is good enough, pick up a bunch of packets on each interrupt; you do lose out slightly on latency, but gain a lot of throughput. Look up 'interrupt moderation', it's not new, and most cards should support it. Professionlly, I ran dual xeon 2690v1 or v2 to 9Gbps for https download on FreeBSD; http hit 10G (only had one 10G to the internet on those machines), but crypto took too much CPU. Dual Xeon 2690v4 ran to 20Gbps, no problem (2x 14 core broadwell, much better AES acceleration, faster ram, more cores, etc, had dual 10G to the internet). Personally, I've just setup 10G between my two home servers, and can only manage about 5-8Gbps with iperf3, but that's with a pentium g2020 on one end (dual core Ivy Bridge, 10 years old at this point), and the network cards are configured for bridging, which means no tcp offloading. Edit: also, check out what Netflix has been doing with 800Gbps, although sendfile and TLS in the kernel cuts out a lot of userspace, kind of equal but opposite of cutting out kernelspace, http://nabstreamingsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/202...

Interrupt moderation only gives a modest improvement, as can be seen from the benchmarking done by Intel. Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation. Furthermore, quoting Gbps numbers is beside the point when the limiting factor is packets per second. It is trivial to improve Gbps numbers simply by using larger packets.

I'm quoting bulk transfer, with 1500 MTU. I could run jumbo packets for my internal network test and probably get better numbers, but jumbo packets are hard. When I was quoting https download on public internet, that pretty much means MTU 1500 as well, but was definitely the case. If you're sending smaller packets, sure, that's harder. I guess that's a big deal if you're a DNS server, or voip (audio only); but if you're doing any sort of bulk transfer, you're getting large enough packets. > Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation. DPDK has uses, sure. But you don't need it for 10G on decent hardware, which includes 7 year old server chips, if you're just doing bulk transfer.

Bulk transfers aren’t that being interesting from a networking perspective. You gonna have a bad time if you optimize only for the best case scenario. Even using IMIX is a low bar. The proper way to do things is linerate using small packets.

Most Linux network drives support NAPI since a couple of decades. No panacea of course, but still, far from having one interrupt per packet.

I think around 2011, they offered the first UT Longhorns Startup course, it was cool and hip and new, and they'd flown in mentors from SV and other places, so I figured, why not? So, after applying, I had shown up at a hotel near campus. While waiting in the lobby, playing with their unsecured wifi, a rather distinguished looking gentleman came up to me, and asked, Hey are you here for the Startup Course interviews? Yeah... Well, why are you here in the lobby? Well, I was told to wait here, and its been a half hour nobody called me. He gave me a look, direct in the eyes, and said, oh, really? And you're just going to sit here and wait? I was dumbfounded. Of course, it made sense, but it felt.. I didn't want to piss off the organizers, right?' "Go in there, and get it!" as he clawed the air like a tiger. Damn, he was right. So i ambled in, looked around, found a seat near the guy organizing (Josh Baer, another awesome guy) introduced myself and sat at a table by myself, just waiting for an in... Then the gentleman from the lobby came in and sat in front of me, with a big grin. Hi? Hi. You're a part of this? Yes, my name's Bob Metcalfe. Cool, thanks for the pep talk. So, whats your story? Well, I founded 3Com, and helped come up with Ethernet. Oh... damn.. cool.. ...And my life has never been the same since! If you read this, thanks Bob.

> "Metcalfe insists on calling Wi-Fi by its original name, Wireless Ethernet, for old times’ sake." Okay, besides all his contributions, I've decided this guy is my favorite for that alone. Imagine if he was your (great?) uncle and you're on a family vacation together. "What's the Wi-Fi password here, Bob?" Bob: "What's the what now?" You: "Excuse me. What's the Wireless Ethernet password?" Bob: "Oh, it's HotelGuest2023"

The archetypal "good enough" solution: Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them. I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection I need to get in my work.

It is also lesson of doing something now and rewriting it later. For example no modern ethernet network uses cd/csma anymore and it was pretty iconic part of original ethernet. Overall ethernet on physical layer has seen quite an evolution from coax and vampire taps, to twisted pair and hubs, to switched networks, and nowdays wireless, single-pair, optical, and virtual networks

You left out a step: ThinNet coax, without vampire taps! That's what was at 3Com when I joined in 1985. I even have a section in The Big Bucks where I took down the entire company for a few seconds by disconnecting the coax. No one noticed.

Ethernet is also an example of a tech that has an easy scaling path: hubs with switched uplink ports made it really easy to divide collision domains. In the early days before everything was switched you could instantly reduce collision losses with a little bit of hardware in the server closet with no other changes to the network.

I remember when hubs were still common; I don't know if any have been made for decades. Even bargain basement switches are switched now, and often even have spanning tree and other 'previously enterprise' features.

Hubs max out at 100Mbps. Everybody today is using Gigabit, so they're effectively extinct. Even at 100Mbps hubs were on the way out. They were pretty hacky. The hardware had two different hubs internally and joined them together with a bit of logic, but that logic was somewhat failure prone and it was common to have 10/100 hubs where the 10 clients couldn't talk with the 100 clients and vice versa. Autodetection was at best a roll of the dice so most people wired down their port settings instead. Everybody hated them and switches got cheap real fast so they didn't last very long. The only thing they were good for was network diagnostics.

> The only thing they were good for was network diagnostics. Indeed - I still have a couple that I used for packet sniffing. Thankfully managed switches or switches smart enough to support port mirroring are inexpensive and thus fairly ubiquitous now.

True, but it did detect transmission in progress (carrier sensing) which helped to avoid collisions in the first place.

Ethernet was always inefficient, with a crazy amount of unused legacy space reserved in an unnecessarily large header. CSMA/CD for contention was one of the ugliest medium access solutions imaginable. The coax implementation needing termination plugs was also ugly. Its advantage was cost, having had no license fees, making it suited to consumer/commercial applications driving economies of scale. It's the VHS of datacomms. It's evolved, thankfully, but it remains an ugly, inefficient standard that only has life because of its legacy. And it's been increasingly jimmied into professional, carrier applications for which it was never intended and where far superior, though more expensive solutions already existed. That's not to say its creators don't deserve credit. It did its job well enough for its early days. But that's why this award comes too late. Because now Ethernet is the bloated, inelegant dinosaur we've built an ecosystem around, but to admire it is to forget the competitors it drove to extinction along the way.

It was a lot less ugly than whatever else passed for networking standards at the physical level in those days. Arcnet, Twinax, Token Ring and so on, I've probably used them all, and at scale. Compared to Ethernet they all sucked, besides being proprietary they were slow, prone to breaking in very complex to troubleshoot ways (though ethernet had its own interesting failure modes in practice it was far more reliable), and some used tons of power which made them unusable for quite a few applications. On top of that it was way cheaper and carried broad support from different vendors, which enabled competition and helped to improve it and keep prices low.

Oh good heavens. Arcnet! When I first learned about writing Linux device drivers, it was trying to get a decent driver for some Arcnet cards that the company I worked at as using in some client installations. Can't remember exactly why we never completed it (well, yea I do. Ethernet worked better, a lot better) but since we never "released the product" they never let us send in the driver we did write to the kernel mailing list. That was in the kernel 1.x days. Now, I feel old. Time for a nap.

Ethernet evolved in backward compatible way for more than 30 years. If we would design a new standard from scratch to fit the same use cases we in theory can learn from the experience and improve things but at the same it would be hard to resist a temptation to make it future-proof by adding a lot of things just in case and this new standard likely will be even more wasteful. And having opportunity doesn't mean it will be used. I often see new design make mistakes avoided in older designs because people have limited time to learn and body of knowledge is too large to always successfully learn from the past. Also hardware is not like software where you can rewrite a site using a JS framework of the day every few years. Compatibility is really important.

You could not be more wrong! Efficiency and overhead are measured as a percent of frame size and 128-byte packets (X.25) or 48-byte frames (Atm) are abortions. 1500 bytes at the outset and the overhead is < 1% and < 0.2% with jumbograms (8kB). Every 802.11 standard is a superset of Ethernet and that makes DIX Ethernet the most scalable network protocol of all time!

Do you mean subset? It was first standardized as 802.3. Contention under CSMA/CD meant it was not scalable - as in it became inefficient as the segment grew. But you're right and I stand corrected in sense of the header/frame length ratio. I'd edit that first sentence if I still could.

What are some superior competing standards, and could they be implemented in a royalty-free way?

The point was more about competing technical choices made by designers, rather than the choice of standards made by consumers. For example TDMA can be arguably more scalable, bandwidth and energy efficient than CSMA/CD and can give consistent PL, PD and PDV, so might have even allowed early business grade voice. Variable header sizes would have allowed efficient use over bandwidth constrained media like radio. But the low cost and fast success of Ethernet formed a barrier to entry for competing LAN standards, where those arguably better technical choices may have found a footing. They eventually found application in other non-LAN standards, so guess royalties weren't an issue.

None of those things could be implemented in the 1970 or 1980s at reasonable cost so they're not actually solutions at all. Hell even making Ethernet fully switched didn't really happen until the 1990s thanks to Moore's law making the ASICs cheap enough. Without mass adoption there's no reason to invest. Look at Token Ring, Ethernet's only real competitor at scale: it quickly started to lag behind. Ethernet shipped 100Mbps several years before Token Ring. The 1Gbps Token Ring standard was never put to hardware.

TDMA is an extension of TDM, which goes back to the 60's. Synchronization was already solved. Variable header size could be implemented with the same preamble concept already used by Ethernet, but used to indicate the end of the header. These were not hard problems. The technology existed, the affordability would have largely depended on adoption, so it's hard to say.

We'll have to agree to disagree. Obviously TDM was known but implementing it for ethernet at a reasonable cost was just not an option at the time (in my opinion).

TDMA needs time synchronization and thus becomes more complex. Even in telecoms the packet switched connections are quickly replacing synchronous time division connections.

The recent-ish 10base-t1 uses something called PLCA instead of CSMA/CD which doesn't require time synchronization, and gives each node in a subnet a dedicated transmission slot.

10Base-T1L is point to point, 10Base-T1S is multidrop, but very limited in nodes and how long the branches/stubs can be. We'll see how it actually performs in field. Microchip seems to be in the T1S boat and TI+AD in T1L.

the best tech doesn't always win, and in fact the "best" tech is typically promoted by people who focus more on the tech and less on go-to-market and competitive strategy. And thus, the "best" tech often loses to the tech that (for example) is better packaged or promoted. Python is a nice example: inelegant language with many deep flaws, but easy syntax and "batteries included" won the day.

That's just not true. Shoddy builders put quality builders out of business all the time. Guess it depends on your faith in markets and your definition of superior.

My memory is that every ring topology had pretty nasty failure characteristics around "a single misbehaving/failing client." Which Ethernet has too, but can generally tolerate a much higher level of imperfect reality, while still providing degraded service. Before you could get plentiful high-quality NICs and cabling, graceful degradation was a killer feature.

"Captain Bob" we called him, at 3Com. In "The Big Bucks" I have two quotes from him, which he graciously allowed me to use as something he would have said (they're not very exciting). Normally I never have a real person appear and do anything; at most people speak of them in the third person. In "Inventing the Future" I have the 1978 story about the lightning strike that took down the Ethernet between PARC and SDD. Bob had actually forgotten it, but he remembered the second lightning strike that helped sell Ethernet, because Ron Crane (RIP) had remembered the first one and engineered the Ethernet card to withstand them. As luck would have it, during a competition there actually was a lightning strike, and 3Com's survived it while the competitor's didn't.

Congrats Bob! If anyone's interested in the history of the early internet, I recently read the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and it is a very interesting read about how we went from ARPA to WWW, including a lot of the warts you associate with large scale projects like ARPANet grew into (and the book features Metcalfe quite extensively when talking about Ethernet and ALOHAnet). Honestly, it's nice to see technology like ethernet, which is both "as simple as it should be but no simpler", and has also stood the test of time get recognized and rewarded!

Now if we could only break away from the frame size limit and have working jumbo frames without a lot of pain. Having millions of packets per second is starting to get a bit ridiculous. Even 10G is still challenging, not to speak of 100G.

It's more a personal account that's 1 year old which opens with a tweet on cancel culture followed by his political leanings, cryptocurrency posts, and an overwhelming amount of basketball stats. It does have the occasional post about his involvement in geothermal energy though but beyond that following the account isn't going to get you any content he's known and respected for.

If he was tweeting anecdotes, or still working (seems he might be?) and tweeting about it it'd probably be a lot more - but it's mostly US basketball (and other sports/personal stuff) by the looks of it, so however veritable a hero it's just not interesting to the same audience (or at least, for the same reason, of course some of us will be basketball fans) - and probably if you're big into 'basketball Twitter' he's ~'nobody'.

This is like when I heard Roger Penrose won a Nobel Prize in 2020 and I thought for a second "wait is this his second? What? You mean he hadn't been awarded one until now? Who was in line ahead of him and for what?"

Reading the original ethernet paper was one of my favorite moments in college. Just a brilliantly pragmatic design (especially handling packet collisions with randomized retransmissions). Made me appreciate how important it is for something to be simple and pragmatic, rather than over-engineered to perfection.

I think in part what you are witnessing there is the power of a single well informed individual over a committee, which is how the competition was doing it.

Somewhat related: The choice of 48 bits for the hardware/station address seems to have been a pretty good choice: it's been 40+ years and we still have no run out. I'm curious to know if anyone has done the math on when Ethernet address exhaustion will occur. While the Ethernet frame has been tweaked with over the decades, addressing has been steady. Curious to know if any transition will ever been needed and how would that work. In hindsight, IP's (initial) 32 bit address was too small, though for a network that was (primarily) created for research purposes, but ended up escaping 'into the wild' and accidentally becoming production, it was probably a reasonable choice: who expected >4 billion hosts on an academic/research-only network?

We're unlikely to ever actually run out. Ethernet addresses are expected to be universally unique, but they're only required to be unique within a collision domain. If someone started reusing addresses from 3c503s, chances are high nobody would notice. If we did run out, devices would need to start generating randomized addresses, and maybe probe for collisions, which isn't unworkable; the number of nodes in a collision domain tends to be low, and the space is large, you might only barely need to to probe for collisions at all if you have a good random source.

Some quick napkin math on the current MAC vendors database: 46 bits of a MAC address are reserved for universally administered unicast (i.e. a globally unique MAC assigned to identify a device). So far we have assigned ~570 billion addresses via 24/28/36 bit range assignments for the same purpose which represents a little under 1% of the space. So nothing urgent, though if we stuck with Ethernet as much as we use it today then in <100 years I wouldn't be surprised if we were "out". At the same time there are also 46 bits of locally administered unicast addresses and, unlike IP, Ethernet addresses only care about the local network (and this isn't a "because we've co-opted them to to save space just like NAT broke IP protocols" rather the design intent of Ethernet). Even if you had 10 billion LANs with 100 devices each and they all used this random non-unique assignment there would only be a ~50% chance there one or more devices would have a collision. The only real advantage I've ever been able to find of programming in unique MAC addresses vs random MAC addresses you can look up what company the MAC was assigned to. It may seem like there is a risk random assignment can be done poorly (e.g. not very randomly) but honestly the same risk exist with assigned ranges as seen by network vendors cheaping out and re-using their MAC blocks (which is significantly more likely to conflict than if they just used random locally administered addresses in the first place).

So when XSIS (Xerox System Integration Standards?) first started selling MAC address blocks in the early 1980s, I think it cost $1k for 16M mac addresses (168 addresses per penny). So there are only 16M blocks of mac addreses available, and it IS possible to run out, if vendors waste the addresses. I don't know what registration costs from The IEEE right now, but once the equivalent of $16B is spent on mac addresses, we will run out of blocks. Maybe today they are selling smaller blocks but the MAC is basically divided into 16M blocks (specified by the first 24 bits / 3 bytes) - each with a registered owner or "unassigned") and 16M MACs within the block (the lower 24 bits). That's why you can enter a MAC address into a lookup website and find out who made the NIC (google search "mac address lookup"): https://aruljohn.com/mac.pl

It was Xerox & Yogen Dalal's choice, not Bob's choice! Xerox blew it with 8-bit station addresses in PuP (PARC Universal Protocol) and wanted to give each station a UID to break ties in database transactions, hence the 48-bits. XNS actually had 3-byte station and 3-byte network size to fit in 6-byte MAC addresses! Metcalfe is not a software engineer and wouldn't have these insights ...

I’ve got his book Packet Communication, and the acknowledgements ends with “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Is this supposed to be an Eastern Egg? I have found the book to look for the context of the statement but I have not found anything interesting after the acknowledgements.

Ah, the best and most readily available source of makeshift jumper wires. Truly an amazing contribution even in ways it wasn't quite designed to be :)

ACM Turing award committee has its head up it's ass? Seriously 25% of winners have NO impact on the field ... Metcalfe was controversial because Alohanet from university of Hawaii pioneered the idea and Metcalfe was seen as writing a nice proof in CACM of the 1/e capacity breakdown theorem and popularizing an already extant technology. He did not build it alone Chuck Thacker probably built most of it but didn't have a PhD! Oh the horror! He should not have gotten it now - either give it sooner or not at all - and he should not be the only one getting it!

I hear the Matcalfe has been spending some time recently at the MIT Julia lab working on climate issues.

The fact that it allowed for all kinds of topologies, and that it served as a bus (shared medium, hence the name 'Ether') rather than a point-to-point link is what I think made the biggest difference. Of course now that we all use switched links they are point-to-point again but an ethernet 'hub' gave you the same effect as a bus with all devices seeing all of the traffic. This made efficient broadcast protocols possible and also allowed for a historical - but interesting - trick: the screw-on taps that you could place on a single coaxial cable running down a department giving instant access without pulling another cable. Zero network configuration required, just get the tap in place and assign a new address. DHCP later took care of that need as well. This was fraught with problems, for instance a single transceiver going haywire could make a whole segment unusable and good luck finding the culprit. But compared to the competition it absolutely rocked.

To build on your comment, although it's been years since I studied Ethernet in depth... - (On the bus thread) Ethernet started from an assumption of bad behavior (out of spec cabling, misbehaving clients, etc.) and tighten requirements just enough to construct a useful network. Much better balance between de facto ruggedness vs performance than its peers. - From the beginning, Ethernet reasoned that it was cheaper to put logic in purpose-built networking hardware than endpoints (i.e. PC network adapters). This was a better scaling tradeoff. 1x $$$ network device + 100x $ client adapter vs 1x $$ networking device + 100x $$ client adapter. - Because of the above, you started to get really cost- and data-efficient networks when the cost of Ethernet switches plummeted. (Remember, in early Ethernet days, networks were hub/broadcast-only!)

Ethernet switches are actually pretty complex things, when you think about it. They have to learn what MAC addresses are behind each port, and build a complex forwarding table and do table lookups in real time. The larger the switch, the more complex it is. Its hard to make it scale. Around the same era, Myrinet switches with higher bandwidth (1.2Gb/s if I remember correctly) and higher density at a fraction of the port cost of slower ethernet switches. This was possible because the Myrinet switches were dumb.. The Myrinet network elected a "mapper" that distributed routes to all NICs. The NICs then pre-pended routing flits to the front of each packet. So to forward a packet to its destination, all a Myrinet switch had to do was strip off and then read the first flit, see that it said "exit this hop on port 7", and then forward it on to the next switch. Higher densities were achieved with multiple chips inside the cabinet. In the mid 2000s we even built one of what was, at the time, one of the worlds largest ethernet switches using (newer, faster Myrinet) internally, and encapsulating the ethernet traffic inside Myrinet. That product died due to pressure from folks that were our partners, but felt threatened by our incredibly inexpensive high density switches. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2323306/myricom-rolls-o... EDIT: fixed routing flit description, added link to PR

Sounds similar to Infiniband where each subnet has a subnet manager which calculates routing tables for the entire subnet, and assigns 16-bit local identifiers (LID) so you stations don't need to use the full 16 byte GUID's. Also Infiniband packets are power of two sized, making fast switching easier.

Neat! (Re: you and parent) At their core, most hardware evolutions seem like optimizing compute:memory:storage:functionality vs the (changing) current state of the art/economy. When Ethernet was first released, compute was expensive. Made sense to centralize compute (in routers) and make everything else dumb-tolerant. Now, compute is cheap and plentiful at network-calculating scales and throughout expectations are very high, so it makes sense to burn compute (including in clients) to simplify routing hardware.

Ha! But they delivered that much value (or more), so the market supported the price until supply flooded. We could do worse for a transformative technology ranking metric than "How overpriced was this when first released?" (significant look at Nvidia cards)

I had a bunch of workloads that quite literally got cut down to about 15% or so of the original runtime (a cluster compressing a whole archive of CDs for a large broadcaster) so I happily paid up. But still... $1000 / port!! And here I have sitting next to me a 48 port gigabit switch that cost 15% of what that 100 megabit switch cost in 1996 or so. Iirc it was one of the first D-link products I bought, it definitely wasn't great (it ran pretty hot) but it worked quite well enough. Amazing progress.

And you can get switches for less than $25 per 10gb port now. Of course the jump from 10mb hub to 100mb switch was much larger than any of the later jumps, just because of the reduced noise.

for years i was carrying around an ethernet splitter that would allow me to connect two devices into one ethernet port. i last used it some 10 years ago in a place without wifi

Yeah, it’s a very cool trick that surprises a lot of people when they learn that only half the wires are used.

Not for gigabit ethernet and good luck picking up the pieces if you find yourself splitting a power-over-ethernet setup :)

using a splitter is usually a temporary solution, and i am unlikely to be sharing a port with a PoE device. nor do i care about gigabit speed when the only reason to use a splitter is to make up for missing wifi.

And it was sniffing heaven. Only paralleled by the brief period of nobody using any serious encryption on their wifi.

Where "brief" was about 10 years, which at the time was about 25% of all time that networks were common.

At the time, maybe. Eventually it will be remembered as a short glitch in tech history.

Yup! A whole other real-time industrial protocol called EtherCAT has been built on top of the same hardware.

Original DIX Ethernet was standardized by my manager, David Redell of Xerox. It was the bare minimum to do the job, 6-byte station destination, 6-byte source address, 2-byte packet length, a 2-byte Ethertype field (the latter 2 were combined for networks with hardware framing), and 32-bit CRC. NO arc in the hardware. It leveraged the move to byte-based memories and small CPUs. It followed the end-to-end principle in system design just about optimally - the most minimal MAC design of all time. EASY TO BUILD UPON AND ENHANCE. Ethernet (CSMA/CD) is a protocol that copies human speech patterns. After someone stops speaking people hear the quiet (carrier sense multiple access / CSMA) and wait a very short and randomized amount of time and begin to speak. If two speakers collide they hear the collision and shut up (CD - collision detection). They both pick a randomized amount of time to pause before trying again. On the second third etc. collision people wait longer and longer before retrying. The thing about original ethernet (1981) is that it wastes 2/3 of the channel because a highly loaded channel has too many collisions and too many back offs. But deployment and wiring were expensive so running a single wire throughout a building was the cheapest possible way to start (enhanced by thinwire Ethernet and twisted pair to have a less bulky cable a few years later). The frame design was PERFECT and within ~10 years people were using ethernet frames to build switched networks and today only radio networks are CSMA/CD = Ethernet.

I was in Xerox SDD in the early 80’s I have lots of memories dealing with the large coax taps which we in the ceiling. I also remember setting up a Star demo at the NCC and someone forget coax cable terminators (or was short one terminator?) which was causing reflectance issues with the signal which was solved by cutting the cable to a precise length to get the demo working.

In the original ethernet design, routers were not used (because 8-bit processors were too slow and 16-bit processors were just starting to emerge). So the original standard proposed repeaters as the way to extend a large network, and this was a very very cheap analog way to grow your network. It was quite common to have a whole building or even several nearby buildings on one ethernet and then a high speed (i.e. 56 Kbps or maybe even a T-1) link to other buildings either nearby or in other cities.

Maybe you know, why isn't the CRC at the end? Then you could stream the packet instead of needing to construct it and then go back to the header to write the CRC.

Back when I was doing a lot of ethernet driver work, I joked to colleagues about what I'd do if I had a time machine. Go back and kill Hitler? no. Go back and stop John Wilkes Booth from shooting Lincoln? No. I'd go back and convince Bob Metcalfe to make ethernet headers 16 bytes rather than 14 to avoid all sorts of annoying alignment issues

Yeah those alignment issues surely have killed more jews than that Hitler guy. /s

Lol. No, its more like everybody will line up take care of those more important things when they get access to a time machine, but when I get access to a time machine, I want to take care of my pet peeve :)

While you're back there, convince people to do IP truncation rather than fragmentation. Truncation would probably be a lot more useful at lower cost than fragmentation, and maybe path MTU problems wouldn't still be an issue. *grumble*grumble*

I feel extremely to have attended one of his keynotes in one network conference once and for the quick opportunity to greet him. Well deserved.

If only USB was half as reliable as Ethernet ... The anti-Turing award goes to the inventors of USB.

Around 2002 he had the wild idea about Ethernet for intra-bus and peripheral communication. Nobody in the room thought it was a good idea. Glad he was smart enough to abandon that idea and stick with networking. I didn't want my mouse and keyboard getting an IP address.

Wifi would have to go to Steve Jobs :-) Lucent was sitting on 802.11 (WaveLAN) for ten years selling super expensive products targeting niche markets and it took Apple to move things forward. More in “Oral History of Arthur “Art” Astrin”, wifi pioneer: https://youtu.be/Tj5NNxVwNwQ

From 1990, the 802.11 standards body was gyrating on radio-based 802.11 ideas. That body would not even have existed without Ethernet.

It coming to Metcalfe for Ethernet 7 years after to Berners-Lee for the WWW is amusing though.

ACM awards are dominated by the theory community. A lot of theoreticians with NO impact on the world have awards. Metcalfe was one of a dozen people who co-invented Ethernet and does not fit the historians "Great man" theory where history is decided by a few "Great Men" who went a different direction at a critical moment ... Ethernet's success is only 25% due to him. For example, in 1979 at UIUC a grad student built 230kbps S-100 cards using rs232 chips and I wrote the Z-80 csma/cd drivers (as a high school student) so it was not rocket science. So there was reluctance to give him an award for something he didn't pioneer all alone.

This just shows what a huge joke the Turing Award process is! He should have gotten this award by 2000 or never at all! But the committee was too busy giving out awards for writing sexy sounding papers about stoplight verification and zero knowledge proofs to honor someone who disrupteded the whole field!

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Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (194) | logout Rethinking Visual Programming with Go (divan.dev) 220 points by techplex 22 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 56 co (Open link)

https://go.jetbrains.com/NDI2LVFWRC0xMTQAAAGE3JX5LPHBSIgka6S7TDfrLHWfJlFfuIuR8hWw8bEjhAyu77Gcm4efCtCegqvLSjQtjRlMJBg=

(Open link)

Let's talk SkipList

BackgroundSkipLists often come up when discussing “obscure” data-structures but in reality they are not that obscure, in fact many of the production grade softwares actively use them. In this post I’ll try to go into Ski (Open link)

What Comes Next for the Most Empty Downtown in America - The New York…

Another factor, Mr. Stoppelman said, was a crucial decision, unusual at the time, to locate the company in a San Francisco office building instead of a Silicon Valley office park.“I’m not sure that Yelp would have succee (Open link)

Owen Pomery

OWEN D. POMERY WORK SHOP ABOUT + CONTACT EDITORIAL RELIEFS EDITION AIRBNB FLAT EYE ERNEST POHA HOUSE CONCEPT SENET VICTORY POINT KIOSK SCI-FI SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS GAME OF THRONES (GAME) NARRATIVE ARCHIT (Open link)

Reddit - Dive into anything

3.9m members in the programming community. Computer Programming (Open link)

Those HTML Attributes You Never Use

In this article, Louis Lazaris describes and demonstrates some interesting HTML attributes that you may or may not have heard of and perhaps find useful enough to personally use in one of your projects. (Open link)

The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)

Since we started PostHog, our team has interviewed 725 people. What's one thing I've taken from this? It's normal for candidates not to ask harder… (Open link)

Go Day 2021 on Google Open Source Live | Building Better Projects with the Go Editor - YouTube

From navigating code to debugging tests, building Go projects in VS Code has never been easier with the latest editor tools. This demo showcased how Go in V... (Open link)

Using GitHub Actions to build automagic Hugo previews of draft articles

This blog is written in Asciidoc, built using Hugo, and hosted on GitHub Pages. I recently wanted to share the draft of a post I was writing with someone and ended up exporting a local preview to a PDF - not a great work (Open link)

The Principal Engineer's Handbook

Leadership without management: the what, the how, the tools, and how to measure success as a Principal+ engineer. (Open link)

Introduction to AWS Lake Formation - Build a Secure Data Lake in Days | AWS Online Tech Talks

AWS Lake Formation (coming soon) will make it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. With AWS Lake Formation, you will be able to ingest, catalog, clean, transform, and secure your data, and make it available for ana (Open link)

Technical Writing for Developers

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, PHP, C++, Dart — there are so many programming languages out there and you may even be totally fluent in several of them! But (Open link)

Why the Fuss About Serverless?

To explain this, I’m going to have to recap on some old work with a particular focus on co-evolution. (Open link)

HLF16: Liskov’s Reading List for Computer Scientists – johanna pirker

Skip to content JOHANNA PIRKER THE BLOG OF JOHANNA PIRKER HLF16: LISKOV’S READING LIST FOR COMPUTER SCIENTISTS by JohannaPosted on23. September 2016 Barbara Liskov pointed us in her talk at Heidelberg L (Open link)

The C4 Model for Software Architecture

The C4 model consists of a hierarchical set of software architecture diagrams. These diagrams are both easy to create and easy to understand for multiple intended audiences. (Open link)

Reading a Profit & Loss statement.

Some years ago, I was explaining to my manager that I was feeling a bit bored, and they told me to learn how to read a Profit & Loss (P&L) statement. At the time, that sounded suspiciously like, “Stop wasting my time,” b (Open link)

Tweet from @gwenshap

Did someone say … cookies? Twitter and its partners use cookies to provide you with a better, safer and faster service and to support our business. Some cookies are necessary to use our services, improve our services, an (Open link)

Immutable Collections in Java using Sealed Types

JDK 15 was released on September 15, 2020. JEP 360 Sealed Types was included as a preview feature in this release. Sealed Types is part of Project Amber. Sealed classes or interfaces can be used to… (Open link)

The Invention of Free Love | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout The Invention of Free Love (aeon.co) 25 points by pepys 4 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments cfigg (Open link)

Expecting a Bad Performance Review? Here’s How to Prepare.

By preemptively taking action if you expect to receive a bad performance review, you may be able to steer a different course for yourself and avoid a foregone conclusion — or at least feel better about the outcome. The a (Open link)

Twitter System Architecture

Twitter is an online social networking service where users can post and read short messages called “tweets”. Most candidates will design twitter as a monolithic service in system design interviews… (Open link)

The Greatest Films of All Time | BFI

In 1952, the Sight and Sound team had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed. The Sight and So (Open link)

The complete guide to protecting your APIs with OAuth2 (part 1)

Many apps today are actually a front-end for a series of API calls. APIs are necessary to proper functioning of such applications, but if you don’t protect them, bad actors can exfiltrate data, DDoS your servers, or othe (Open link)

Stay Interviews (the opposite of Exit Interviews) – Mike Crittenden

Exit Interviews ask why people are leaving, and Stay Interviews ask why they keep working here. (Open link)

Breaking Out of an Endless Cycle of Meetings

This is a summary from a recent Twitter thread I shared (which does explain the short paragraphs, I hope). (Open link)

Shields Down

Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a good friend who asked, “I know you’re really happy with your cu (Open link)

https://www.macstories.net/stories/ios-16-the-macstories-review/

When is the last time your iPhone truly surprised you? The answer to this question is a fascinating Rorschach test that can say a lot about a person’s relationship with Apple’s mobile platform. Some might say it was over (Open link)

Nobody optimizes happiness

People don’t seem to try very hard to make themselves happier. Why not? (Open link)

Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

Mercurial 5.2 was released on November 5, 2019. It is the first version of Mercurial that supports Python 3. This milestone comes nearly 11 years after Python 3.0 was first released on December 3, 2008. Speaking as a mai (Open link)

using www-authenticate for user authentication

This article explains how to use the www-authenticate header to handle user authentication without any client side code. (Open link)

Generic Data Structures

A collection of generic data structures written in Go. - zyedidia/generic: A collection of generic data structures written in Go. (Open link)

Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good.

Insurance for your mind. (Open link)

GopherCon 2022: Russ Cox - Compatibility: How Go Programs Keep Working - YouTube

Go 1, the first stable release of Go, came with a compatibility promise. This talk will explain why that's important, what it does and doesn't mean, and the ... (Open link)

The Grug Brained Developer

Introduction this collection of thoughts on software development gathered by grug brain developer grug brain developer not so smart, but grug brain developer program many long year and learn some things although mostly s (Open link)

On-call with Tammy Bryant Butow

Get started reading ''On-call with Tammy Bryant Butow'' by Elena Boroda (Open link)

A Short, Simple Introduction to Information Theory – Ryan Moulton's Articles

Information Theory is one of the most useful things for Computer Scientists to understand about statistics, and it's deeply related to things we do every day. If you are comfortable writing code but sometimes intimidated (Open link)

What’s New in Go 1.20, Part I: Language Changes · The Ethically-Trained Programmer

Well, it’s that time once again. It’s time for a new release of the Go programming language. Go 1.18 in Q1 of 2022 was a major release that featured the long awaited addition of generics to the language and also had lots (Open link)

https://letterboxd.com/email/call-sheet/2022-08/

Hello film friends, We know, we know. We can’t believe we are ripping through August either. But we are barreling headlong into fall festival season, bub, so get used to it. Luckily, there’s an inordinately large number (Open link)

[ 2022-May-23 10:19 ]

The Go "functional options" pattern is a way of passing options to a function. The function takes a variable number of arguments, which are themselves functions (a type like ...func(*config). I think it was first introdu (Open link)

Don't make yourself redundant

When splitting big teams into two smaller teams, don't make yourself redundant. Instead, try this advice to remain impactful. (Open link)

Contributing to Complex Projects – Mitchell Hashimoto

Table of ContentsStep 1: Become a UserStep 2: Build the ProjectStep 3: Learn the Hot-Path InternalsTrace DownLearn UpExperiment and Break ThingsSupplement with MediaStep 4: Read and Reimplement Recent CommitsStep 5: Make (Open link)

A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16 - Advanced Web Machinery

From Java 8 to 17 (Open link)

Understanding Java’s Project Loom

You can use this guide to understand what Java's Project loom is all about and how its virtual threads (also called 'fibers') work under the hood. (Open link)

Microservices to Async Processing Migration at Scale

Sharma Podila shares from their experience migrating to asynchronous processing at scale, requiring attention to managing data loss, a highly available infrastructure, and elasticity to handle bursts. (Open link)

1.3. Productivity

Design is the art of arranging code to work today, and be changeable forever. — Sandi Metz The last underlying principle I want to highlight is productivity. Developer productivity is a sprawling topic but it boils (Open link)

Engineering Principles ⭐ - by Luca Rossi - Refactoring

How to use principles to enable autonomy and alignment in your team. (Open link)

Principles & Best practices of REST API Design

This best-practices article intends for developers interested in creating RESTful Web services that provide high reliability and consistency across multiple service suites; following these… (Open link)

Do engineering managers need to be technical?

And what do we even mean when we say “technical”? (Open link)

https://makoism.com/r/0c34f4f0?m=7f5f7e84-a279-4fa1-8edf-d1b8ea26db43

(Open link)

Quick fixes to your code review workflow

Code review is often a pain point, so I end up talking to most clients about it. Here are some quick fixes for common problems I often end up suggesting to them. (Open link)

This is What a Large-Scale Cloud Adoption Program Looks Like

Dio Rettori discusses some of the lessons learned, challenges, and considerations of large-scale adoption for JPMorgan Chase. (Open link)

5 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job

Credit: Comfreak / Pixabay By now, we’ve all heard of the great resignation. Over the past 18 months or so, many people have had more time to think about what they want from their jobs, and the kind of conditions they (Open link)

Cancelation, Context, and Plumbing

Cancellation, Context, and Plumbing GothamGo 2014 Sameer Ajmani Video This tal (Open link)

Welcome to Comprehensive Rust 🦀 - Comprehensive Rust 🦀

This is a four day Rust course developed by the Android team. The course covers the full spectrum of Rust, from basic syntax to advanced topics like generics and error handling. It also includes Android-specific content (Open link)

Software Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report—April 2022

An overview of how the InfoQ editorial team sees the Software Architecture and Design topic evolving in 2022, with a focus on what architects are designing for today. (Open link)

The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers (inc.com) 428 points by wslh 1 day ago | flag | (Open link)

When To Use Generics

When to use generics when writing Go code, and when not to use them. (Open link)

How to Handle a Disagreement on Your Team

Rely on your mediation skills, not your authority. (Open link)

The Four Stages of Good Feedback | The Intentional Organization

Why is it so frickin hard to provide people with valuable feedback, let alone getting meaningful feedback from others? One of two things tends to be the case: we either don’t know how to ask for good feedback, or we don’ (Open link)

The 7 Best Two-Player Board Games of 2022 | Reviews by Wirecutter

To find the best one-on-one games, we talked with experts and play-tested 20 high-rated titles. (Open link)

How to choose the best Java garbage collector

Improve Java application performance by choosing the best garbage collector for your application's throughput, latency, and footprint requirements. (Open link)

Apple Watch Ultra vs. Garmin Fenix 7, Epix, and Enduro 2!

How does the Apple Watch Ultra hold up as a premium sports watch vs. the Garmin Fenix 7, Epix, and Enduro 2? Here is what you should know! (Open link)

3 years after Data mesh: lessons learnt from early believers of the mesh

Back in 2019. At that time, I was deploying a data lake strategy inside Michelin and we had decided to build the main one as a platform to enable more data use case. I was having a coffee while reading my mail. In my box (Open link)

YOW! 2019 - Josh Long - The Reactive Revolution - YouTube

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world (Open link)

Jazz Is Freedom | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (199) | logout Jazz Is Freedom (thebaffler.com) 93 points by ignored 14 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 56 comments navan (Open link)

How to pick startup ideas

One of the most important things I learned from running a startup is that on a macro scale the innovation market is efficient. If the market conditions allow for a startup to arise, it’s overwhelmingly probable that mult (Open link)

Building a CI build monitoring robot | Don Raab | Medium

Ten years ago, I wanted to use a Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit to build a robot that could continuously monitor our software development builds. (Open link)

6 Metrics To Watch for on Your K8s Cluster

Kubernetes. Nowadays, it seems companies in the industry are divided into two pools: those that already use it heavily for their production workloads and those that are migrating their workloads into… (Open link)

https://programmerweekly.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f68dcee17c92724bc7822fb&id=6af9207320&e=d7c3968f32

Some tactical and strategic tips for writing effectively as a software developer. (Open link)

The end of Big Data

Databricks, Snowflake, and the end of an overhyped era. (Open link)

Fallacies of Distributed Systems

Fallacies of distributed systems are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make. (Open link)

How subvocalization makes you a better reader

Is subvocalization keeping you from becoming a faster reader? Here's what the science says — and how to actually increase your reading speed. (Open link)

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained) - Farnam Street

The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ... (Open link)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HosPml1qkrg

VS Code's new merge editor interface gives you the view you've been missing for easily resolving merge conflicts. 00:00 - Intro 00:30 - What is a merge conf... (Open link)

The Seven Deadly Sins of Consumer Technology

Investing in Lust, Pride, Sloth, Greed, Envy, Wrath, and Gluttony (Open link)

Automating NASA Wallpapers with Shortcuts and SpaceWall

SpaceWall wallpapers. For this week’s special issue of MacStories Weekly to celebrate Week 2 of Automation April, I dusted off an old shortcut of mine and updated it for the modern era of Shortcuts automations and the ab (Open link)

Breaking the Monolith at Twitch: Part One

This is Part One (of two) of our story chronicling Twitch’s journey from monolithic architecture to microservices. In Part One, you’ll learn about our early days, from our rapid growth to the perfo... (Open link)

Cache made consistent: Meta’s cache invalidation solution

When it comes to cache invalidation, we believe we now have an effective solution to bridge the gap between theory and practice. (Open link)

Descriptive Words for Music

Looking for some descriptive words for music? Is that types of music, sounds of music or effects of music? We have examples of them all, from folk to funk and tempo to timbre. (Open link)

https://go.jetbrains.com/NDI2LVFWRC0xMTQAAAGE3JX5K9Bz4BmHEnjmUY3RjkKP9QHvLGsU3Nm00Ok89E6DSlvhTPOYTVovt2p4bTxeQUggXvg=

(Open link)

Library vs Service vs Sidecar

All software applications are composed of re-usable elements. The objective and functionality of these reusable elements vary from infra level concern to security level concern to business… (Open link)

Why it’s difficult to build teams in high growth organisations | by Jason Yip | Medium

By “high growth”, I mean in terms of employee count and roughly doubling or more every year. Even at slower growth rates, some of the phenomena I’ll describe may be relevant. The only option where… (Open link)

Golang Microservices — New generation programming language

As part of a technology-driven organization, it is certain that the expectations grow exponentially higher every time for long-term sustenance. So, there is always a demand for solutions that offer… (Open link)

Dotfiles Management | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (199) | logout Dotfiles Management (mitxela.com) 266 points by threeme3 16 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 112 comments p (Open link)

The case of the missing DNS packets: a Google Cloud support story

How a Google Cloud support engineer found one customer’s missing DNS packets (Open link)

You and your mind garden

In French, “cultiver son jardin intérieur” means to tend to your internal garden—to take care of your mind. The garden metaphor is particularly apt: taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds (Open link)

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

(Open link)

Level Up - Issue #143

Level Up - The Perplexing Platform TeamI've been thinking a lot about platform teams this week. When I work with a CTO at new companies, at some point, the topic (Open link)

Gource - a software version control visualization tool

Software projects are displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the t (Open link)

Measuring Service Availability – A Software Architect's Ramblings

How do you measure service availability in modern web services? (Open link)

Career Development:  What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP | Kellblog

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my comp (Open link)

https://programmerweekly.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f68dcee17c92724bc7822fb&id=b272a26398&e=d7c3968f32

Software systems are increasingly based on data, rather than code. A new class of tools and technologies have emerged to process data for both analytics and ML. (Open link)

Move Fast or Die: Key Startup Lessons

Lessons from Facebook, Dropbox, and SPC on the singular importance of speed. (Open link)

OpenFeature

(Open link)

What's in a Good Error Message?

In a way, an error message tells a story; and as with every good story, you need to establish some context about its general settings. For an error message, this should tell the recipient what the code in question was tr (Open link)

Helpful Command Line Scripts and Automation in My Setup - Sebastian Daschner

sebastiandaschner blog About Workshops Courses Consulting Blog News More Contact Helpful Command Line Scripts and Automation in My Setup #productivity #commandline friday, january 06, 2023 In this video, I’ve put togethe (Open link)

Pulse | LinkedIn

選擇語言 Page not found Uh oh, we can’t seem to find the page you’re looking for. Try going back to the previous page or see our Help Center for more information Go to your feed © 2022 User Agreement Privacy Policy Comm (Open link)

https://wherewithall.com/resources/20-Great-Open-Questions.pdf

(Open link)

What is Developer Experience? a roundup of links and goodness

I recently contributed to a series of fireside chats hosted by LaunchDarkly. One of the themes that we discussed was Developer Experience, and how to improve it. I was asked by one of the attendees at the EMEA event (vid (Open link)

Cloud Native Java with the Micronaut Framework

The Micronaut framework provides a solid foundation for building Cloud Native Java microservices. It reduces the use of Java reflection, runtime proxy generation, and dynamic classloading. (Open link)

Let’s Architect! Creating resilient architecture

The AWS Well-Architected Framework defines resilience as “the capability to recover when stressed by load (more requests for service), attacks (either accidental through a bug, or deliberate through intention), and failu (Open link)

Steve Jobs MIT 1992 / Steve Jobs talk /Steve Jobs speech / - YouTube

Steve Jobs, one of the computer industry’s foremost entrepreneurs, gives a wide-ranging talk to a group of MIT Sloan School of Management students in the spr... (Open link)

Lost in the Froth

Oh, to have sycophants of one’s own. (Open link)

https://twitter.com/rhein_wein/status/1518615061023010816

(Open link)

Java Champion Josh Long on Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3

Microservices show where Java lags behind other languages. Reactive programming provides a concise DSL to express the movement of state and to write concurrent, multithreaded code with better scaling. (Open link)

Camille Defrenne and Suzanne Simard: The secret language of trees | TED Talk

Most of the forest lives in the shadow of the giants that make up the highest canopy. These are the oldest trees, with hundreds of children and grandchildren. They check in with their neighbors, share food, supplies and (Open link)

Create macOS or Linux virtual machines - WWDC22 - Videos - Apple Developer

Learn how you can use the Virtualization framework to quickly create virtual machines on your Mac. We'll show you how to create a virtual... (Open link)

A POM by any other name

By POM I mean Apache Maven's Project Object Model. The POM format is widely used not just by Apache Maven to build and consume projects, but also by other tools such as IDEs, build tools, code analyzers, etc. Understandi (Open link)

A Leader’s Guide to Role Mapping

Have you ever found that you enter the week without a clear plan of action? Do you wish that you could articulate each team member’s role and responsibilities more clearly? In a dynamic, fast-paced… (Open link)

Head-First Kubernetes

A Kubernetes tutorial for complete beginners. (Open link)

Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks? | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks? (mattstoller.substack.com) 381 points by PaulHoule 2 days ago | fla (Open link)

Be Less Technical | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout Be Less Technical (sequential.dev) 141 points by 7237139812 8 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 69 comments r (Open link)

Three Things NOT to say to a Gartner Analyst

I just passed my one-year anniversary of being a Senior Research Director for Database at Gartner and it’s been every bit the provocative experience I anticipated. The role has added an enjoyable, new dimension to my pro (Open link)

Carefully exploring Rust as a Python developer | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout Carefully exploring Rust as a Python developer (karimjedda.com) 118 points by EntICOnc 10 hours ago | flag | hide | past | fa (Open link)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3542929.3563483?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

(Open link)

The Observer Effect – Tobi Lütke

Welcome to the third interview on 'The Observer Effect'. We are lucky to have one of the most interesting founders in technology and commerce - Tobi Lütke, Founder and CEO of Shopify. This interview was (Open link)

https://golangweekly.com/link/127556/4d6ea41021

Tags Go , Go tooling Most tutorials on Go tooling (and probably most other tooling) tend to focus on the happy path - the input code is perfectly vali (Open link)

Testing an Apple Watch Ultra in the Scottish Highlands - David Smith, Independent iOS Developer

I was very excited when Apple announced the Apple Watch Ultra this fall. I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch on my wrist nearly every day since they were first released seven years ago. What was so exciting about the Ultra (Open link)

6 Event-Driven Architecture Patterns — Part 1

Learn about 6 battle-tested event-driven architecture patterns (on top of Kafka) that are used by Wix microservices (Open link)

Tweet from @9to5mac

Don’t miss what’s happening People on Twitter are the first to know. Log in Sign up Did someone say … cookies? Twitter and its partners use cookies to provide you with a better, safer and faster service and to support ou (Open link)

How to Best Use MTT* Metrics to Optimize Your Incident Response

Selecting the correct MTT* metric to improve your incident response is important. If the wrong metric is chosen, the improvements may get lost in the noise of a multivariable equation. (Open link)

https://every.to/p/operating-well-what-i-learned-at-stripe

It's a state, not an outcome. (Open link)

Own Your Shit

"It's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you." -Batman Begins (Open link)

Why Passkeys Will Be Simpler and More Secure Than Passwords

Passkeys are a new way to log into websites and apps that replaces passwords. The industry-standard passkey technology is simpler and more secure than passwords (even with two-factor authentication), resists phishing, an (Open link)

Apache Maven 4.0.0 - The Future | Karl Heinz Marbaise (EN) - YouTube

Interested participants will learn what is currently going on in the development of Apache Maven 4.X. The goal is to get an Apache Maven version 4.0.0-alpha-... (Open link)

https://sapling-scm.com/docs/scale/overview

Sapling supports large monorepos that have tens of millions of files and (Open link)

I replaced my iPhone with the Apple Watch Ultra — here's what happened

Here's what happened when I replaced my iPhone 14 with the Apple Watch Ultra for 24 hours. The results are surprising, to say the least. (Open link)

https://twitter.com/alexxubyte/status/1491821606422781975

(Open link)

‎www.covingtoninnovations.com/mc/WriteThinkLearn.pdf

(Open link)

How to put machine learning models into production

Data scientists excel at creating models that represent and predict real-world data, but effectively deploying machine learning models is more of an art than science. Deployment requires skills more commonly found in sof (Open link)

Life is not short | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout Life is not short (dkb.show) 298 points by dbrereton 4 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 190 comments throwa (Open link)

What Is Time?

I think the flow of time is not part of the fundamental structure of reality,” theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli tells me. He is currently working on a theory of quantum gravity in which the variable of time plays no p (Open link)

Confluence Mobile - Apache Software Foundation

Navigation Confluence Mobile Loading... (Open link)

Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22 | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22 (slack.engineering) 286 points by alphabettsy 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 165 com (Open link)

Maintaining a medium-sized Java library in 2022 and beyond

scc --exclude-dir docs/book ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code Complexity ──────────────────────────────── (Open link)

https://tyrrrz.me/blog/fakes-over-mocks

(Open link)

https://programmerweekly.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f68dcee17c92724bc7822fb&id=b67a81ce2f&e=d7c3968f32

This article is about a few quick thumb rules I use when writing shell scripts that I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Very opinionated.... (Open link)

30 of the Best Words to Describe Music that Work Like a Perfect Pitch

Sometimes music can be so beautiful that words seem to fall short. there are tons of words to describe music that can work like a perfect pitch. (Open link)

The Book

This is the story of Simon Wardley. Follow his journey from bumbling and confused CEO lost in the headlights of change to someone with a vague idea of what they're doing. (Open link)

https://makoism.com/r/13f2e8e2?m=7f5f7e84-a279-4fa1-8edf-d1b8ea26db43

Your healing creates waves that are consciously and unconsciously felt by others. The vibration or energy that you emit reverberates outward and influences the environment and those in it. Your peace can be felt by other (Open link)

Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It's the all-in-one workspace for you and your team (Open link)

https://mydeveloperplanet.com/2022/11/30/docker-best-practices/

In this blog, you will learn some Docker best practices mainly focussed on Java applications. This is not only a theoretical exercise, but you will learn how to apply the best practices to your Dockerfiles. Enjoy! 1. Int (Open link)

http://geraldonit.com/2022/12/06/percentage-sql-window-functions/

Sometimes you have the requirement to calculate percentages on some values of your data. There are multiple ways of doing it, of course, but often people are not aware that you do not have to calculate these percentages (Open link)

https://makoism.com/r/a862d4ec?m=7f5f7e84-a279-4fa1-8edf-d1b8ea26db43

Plan on a Page Checklist A brief mission statement and vision for your team. What does your team do? What is your mission? What gets you up in the morning—eager to help our customers, company, and community? What is your (Open link)

DataHub: Popular metadata architectures explained | LinkedIn Engineering

When I started my journey at LinkedIn ten years ago, the company was just beginning to experience extreme growth in the volume, variety, and velocity of our data. Over the next few years, my colleagues and I in LinkedIn’ (Open link)

Exactly-Once Semantics Are Possible: Here’s How Kafka Does It

<p>I’m thrilled that we have hit an exciting milestone the Apache Kafka® community has long been waiting for: we have introduced exactly-once semantics in Kafka in the 0.11 release and […]</p> (Open link)

https://makoism.com/r/db85aac0?m=7f5f7e84-a279-4fa1-8edf-d1b8ea26db43

Plan Your Next #131 (Open link)

Awesome Cold Showers

For when people get too hyped up about things. Contribute to hwayne/awesome-cold-showers development by creating an account on GitHub. (Open link)

https://programmerweekly.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f68dcee17c92724bc7822fb&id=fbfd70605d&e=d7c3968f32

SSH port forwarding explained in a clean and visual way. How to use local and remote port forwarding. What sshd settings may need to be adjusted. How to memorize the right flags. (Open link)

The Three Phases of Software Development | Tower Blog

Discover the three phases of software development, as depicted through 30 commit messages encountered by our community! (Open link)

10 Pep-Talks for the Cynical

drowning out the voice of shame with the voice of reason (Open link)

Distributional Semantics

To capture meaning of words in their vectors, we first need to define the notion of meaning that can be used in practice. For this, let us try to understand how we, humans, get to know which w (Open link)

Computer Networking Basics For Developers

What is a LAN? What is a network segment? Ethernet collision domains vs broadcast domains. How network switches work? How to send IP packets? VLAN vs VXLAN. (Open link)

Exploring the nap paradox: are mid-day sleep bouts a friend or foe?

Sleep Med. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2018 Sep 1.Published in final edited form as:PMCID: PMC5598771NIHMSID: NIHMS858129PMID: Author information Copyright and License information DisclaimerAbstractThe mid-day na (Open link)

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Ready to switch from your Apple Watch Series 7 to the new Series 8 or SE? Or maybe you just need to transfer your existing Apple Watch with your new iPhone? Follow along for how to seamlessly pair a new or existing Apple (Open link)

25 Software Design Interview Questions to Crack Any Programming and Technical Interviews

Hello guys, If you have given any coding interview then you know that System design or Software design problems are an important part of programming job interviews, and if you want to do well, you… (Open link)

The Best Fantasy Books You’ve Never Heard Of

Speculative fiction readers will discover some hidden gems with this list of the best fantasy books you've never heard of. (Open link)

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Welcome to my blog! I am a final year student studying Electronic and Information Engineering at Imperial (Open link)

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A summary of Accelerated Expertise, the best book on accelerating training programs we have today. (Open link)

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If you're a bit sad like me, one of the most interesting features of iOS 15 is Focus Mode. Bringing some much-needed updates to do not disturb that went before it, and also making your phone much more customisable in dif (Open link)

(Open link)

How to Build a Happy Life: How to Prioritize Joy - The Atlantic

Arthur C. Brooks and Lori Gottlieb discuss the importance of fun, the cultural distortion of emotions as “good” or “bad,” and how envy points you in the direction of your deepest desires. (Open link)

Fuckarounditis - Leangains

September 27, 2011 — Posted in Training Goal Setting Reverse Pyramid Training Weight Training Dear readers, it is with troublesome news I break my three months of silence. The (Open link)

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I’m so smitten with learning that I fear I may be addicted to it. (Open link)

Making Sense Of Single Action Lists In OmniFocus

Making Sense Of Single Action Lists In OmniFocus OmniFocus knows three different types of Projects: Sequential Projects, Parallel Projects and Single Action Lists. You would typically think that most... (Open link)

What Kind of Man Was Anthony Bourdain?

He was so damaged, and yet he showed us so much of the world. (Open link)

Testing in Production, the safe way

In this post, I hope to explore different forms of “testing in production”, when each form of testing is the most beneficial as well as how to test services in production in a safe way. However… (Open link)

https://twitter.com/dandiep

(Open link)

June Picks: The Movies and TV You Can't Miss

June Picks: The Movies and TV You Can't Miss (Open link)

How are you doing?

A journey of emotional awareness, where we uncover the power of naming and visualizing your feelings. (Open link)

Java 8 to 18: Most important changes in the Java Platform - YouTube

JavaOne is back! ➱ https://oracle.com/javaone Java 8 launched in March of 2014, Java 18 in March of 2022. There are 8 years of progress, 203 JDK Enhancemen... (Open link)

JDBC - a short guide

You can use this guide to learn the basics of JDBC: How to connect to any database and execute SQL queries. (Open link)

How to get promoted

Almost everyone who does great work toils in relative obscurity. Performance reviews are social fiction. How do people really advance through the corporate hierarchy? (Open link)

Utilitarianism: negative utilitarianism

Negative-utilitarianism challenges the moral symmetry of pleasure and pain. It would justify erasing the world were that the only way to eradicate suffering (Open link)

Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software

Software is rarely designed in isolation. It doesn't happen by one person going away in their corner for some time, then coming back with a thoroughly thought-out map of what to build and how. And as they explain the app (Open link)

https://jchyip.medium.com/my-take-on-why-goal-cascades-are-harmful-and-what-to-do-instead-e9ebadd44d4a

As long as it’s more than one person AND it’s important that we achieve some collective goal THEN we need some way of facilitating coherent action across an organisation. Without coherence, you’ll… (Open link)

https://buff.ly/3GNg1EZ

I’m so smitten with learning that I fear I may be addicted to it. (Open link)

“A damn stupid thing to do”—the origins of C

Today, C may be a lingua franca among programmers. This is its (abridged) history. (Open link)

The Eckel Index: New language features from Java 9 through Java 17

(Open link)

How to take things less personally

Always blaming yourself or assuming others think ill of you? A CBT therapist shares ways to break these self-critical habits (Open link)

An overview of version control in programming

In practice, computer code is constantly being transformed. At the beginning of a project, the computer code often takes the form of sketches that are gradually refined. Later, the code can be optimized or corrected, som (Open link)

Artsy Engineering

:wave: - The documentation for being an Artsy Engineer - artsy/README: - The documentation for being an Artsy Engineer (Open link)

Guide to memorizing movie/TV scenes and using them as memory palace

I have watched many many TV series. All of them I’ve tried to memorize in some extent. Just for pleasure of being able to rewatch some scenes and recall episodes in order, and thus not forget them, but also for using the (Open link)

A Better Way to Manage Projects

The GOVNO framework is a novel approach to project management that aims to improve upon the shortcomings of the popular scrum methodology. Each letter of the acronym represents a key aspect of the framework: G: Governan (Open link)

A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 18

From Java 8 to 18 (Open link)

A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter

I'm trying some experimental tiers on Patreon to see if I can get to substack-like levels of financial support for this blog without moving to substack! A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter This was co-authored (Open link)

Tools for better thinking | Untools

Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems. (Open link)

https://golangweekly.com/link/124976/4d6ea41021

Learn how to deploy a Go web application with Docker, and how Docker can help improve your development workflow and deployment process. (Open link)

Copying Better: How To Acquire The Tacit Knowledge of Experts

Much of expertise is tacit: that is, it cannot be captured through words alone. We look at techniques to learn the tacit knowledge of experts. (Open link)

Overview ¶

Go is a tool for managing Go source code. (Open link)

A visual guide on troubleshooting Kubernetes deployments

Troubleshooting in Kubernetes can be a daunting task. In this article you will learn how to diagnose issues in Pods, Services and Ingress. (Open link)

https://open.substack.com/pub/anandwrites/p/the-founder-of-craigslist-on-giving?utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

A conversation with Craig Newmark (Open link)

Seven Hard-Earned Lessons Learned Migrating a Monolith to Microservices

Based on experience gained from several microservices migrations, these seven lessons can help you be successful and overcome or avoid common challenges. (Open link)

Did Medium Succeed?

The past, present, and future of writing on the internet (Open link)

https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal%3A236930/datastream/PDF_01/view

(Open link)

Sequenced Collections, Purity, and more at JavaOne - Inside Java Newscast #31 - YouTube

JavaOne is back! ➱ https://oracle.com/javaoneSequenced collections introduce an abstraction for collections with a known encounter order like all lists and... (Open link)

Feature Flags: A Gentle Introduction

Feature flags allows you to ship code more frequently, test on production, and wow your users by revealing the feature at the right moment. (Open link)

How to build large Golang applications using FX | by The Devops Guy | Dec, 2022 | Medium

Golang is a popular programming language with powerful features. However, one can find it complicated to organize a large codebase while juggling dependencies. Go developers sometimes have to pass… (Open link)

The 10 REST Commandments - Treblle

Find out how to build great REST APIs in any language by following these 10 essential rules. (Open link)

Journey into Observability: Reading material | Mads Hartmann

I’ve been reading up on observability over the last three months. In this post I have organized the material into a sort of recommended reading order. It doesn’t reflect the order in which I read it, but I think this ord (Open link)

User space

For the term "user space" as used in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:User pages. "Kernel space" redirects here. For the mathematical definition, see Null space. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please h (Open link)

Why Runs/Hits/Errors should no longer define baseball ... but still does

The R/H/E box is outdated and largely unhelpful, yet it appears prominently on every major league scoreboard and TV broadcast. Here's how it got that way. (Open link)

April 2022 GoSF Meetup Serverless potential runaway cost Transcoder API and Designing in Go - YouTube

DetailsApril Meetup➤➤ AGENDA ➤➤6:30 - 6:40 - GoSF Announcements / Community Job Opportunities6:40 - 7:10 - Designing as a Developer in GoLang - Sushrut Athav... (Open link)

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. Scientists have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6,000-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed hum (Open link)

44 engineering management lessons

Welcome to engineering management. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s rewarding — but most importantly it’s new! What worked for you before won’t work now. You’ll have to acquire a new set of skills, and shed some bad habit (Open link)

How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf] | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf] (covingtoninnovations.com) 775 points by Secr (Open link)

A Complete Guide to Grid

Our comprehensive guide to CSS grid, focusing on all the settings both for the grid parent container and the grid child elements. (Open link)

One-on-ones with executives. | Irrational Exuberance

Often when an organization is going through some turmoil, executives think to themselves, “Ah, I should have some one-on-ones with the team so they can hear how we’re handling this.” On the other side, I frequently hear (Open link)

here

Sample code and instructions for steps through different container image build options. - GitHub - maeddes/options-galore-container-build: Sample code and instructions for steps through different container image build op (Open link)

103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known

Today is my birthday. I turn 70. I’ve learned a few things so far that might be helpful to others. For the past few years, I’ve jotted down bits of unsolicited advice each year and much to my surprise I have more to add (Open link)

Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags)

Manage different toggles differently As discussed earlier, there are various categories of Feature Toggles with different characteristics. These differences should be embraced, and different toggles (Open link)

Production Oriented Development - Paul Osman - Medium

Code working in production is the only thing that matters. Teams should optimize for delivering code to production as quickly as possible. (Open link)

The Scoop: Inside the Longest Atlassian Outage of All Time

Hundreds of companies have no access to JIRA, Confluence and Atlassian Cloud. What can engineering teams learn from the poor handling of this outage? (Open link)

How to Read a Wine Label, in 12 Easy Lessons - The New York Times

The wine shop can be intimidating, with so many different styles of labeling. Here’s help in decoding a dozen basic types. (Open link)

https://programmerweekly.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f68dcee17c92724bc7822fb&id=562e70933e&e=d7c3968f32

Mindset, 100-day plan, and balancing learning and taking action to earn trust. (Open link)

Build the Modular Monolith First | Hacker News

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A deep dive to Canary Deployments with Flagger, NGINX and Linkerd on Kubernetes

Table of Contents Intro Why Flagger Prerequisites NGINX (Ingress) Canary Deployment Try it out Linkerd (ServiceMesh) Canary Deployment with Ingress support Try it out Summary Intro Lately, I’ve been checkin (Open link)

https://programmerweekly.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f68dcee17c92724bc7822fb&id=a355d55ec5&e=d7c3968f32

Troubleshooting in Kubernetes can be a daunting task. In this article you will learn how to diagnose issues in Pods, Services and Ingress. (Open link)

What you need to know about cluster logging in Kubernetes

Explore how different container logging patterns in Kubernetes work. (Open link)

Fairness in multi-tenant systems

Building fairness into multitenant systems to provide predictable performance and availability (Open link)

Sales email subject lines: 50+ tips, examples, and biggest mistakes

Find out about the best ways to write subject lines for your cold sales emails to improve your open and response rates! This post is here to help you craft a subject line that appeals to your customers & is relevant to y (Open link)

Learn about Concept Maps | Hacker News

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https://programmerweekly.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f68dcee17c92724bc7822fb&id=62ca687d1d&e=d7c3968f32

Updates about my life and what I learn about creating software (Open link)

https://makoism.com/r/8f092d3c?m=7f5f7e84-a279-4fa1-8edf-d1b8ea26db43

I’m rewriting The Business for the next book. This piece is almost 15 years old, much has changed in negotiating an offer letter, and I have more advice on how to analyze those offers. So much advice that I am idea paral (Open link)

What TPMs Do and What Software Engineers Can Learn From Them

A deep dive with five Technical Program Managers (TPM) on what the role is, how it evolved, and how engineers and managers can benefit from working with TPMs. (Open link)

iPhone 14 Pro Camera Preview: The Hardware Changes – Lux

This time of the year always excites us: it brings a look at what’s new in iPhone photography. First up is our brief look at the technical specifications of the new iPhone 14 Pro cameras. Our next post field tests the n (Open link)

When does a table become too big?

I happened across an interesting thread on Twitter today which posed the question about when you should intervene with alternative solutions as a table gets larger over time: It is always good practice to be proactive on (Open link)

Professor Castleberry's Philosophical Lecture Shorts: Martin Heidegger and Being in the World - YouTube

Professor Castleberry gives a lecture on Heidegger's Being-in-the-World (Open link)

This 715-song playlist is scientifically verified to give you the chills, thanks to “frisson”

Listening to some songs can cause a powerful physiological response known as "frisson." What is it, and why does it happen? (Open link)

Study Tips from Richard Feynman | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (194) | logout Study Tips from Richard Feynman (piggsboson.medium.com) 162 points by takiwatanga 13 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorit (Open link)

The ability to build

Issue 120: Manifesting through construction and assembly (Open link)

Learn PWA

A course that breaks down every aspect of modern progressive web app development. (Open link)

Why are there so many tech layoffs, and why should we be worried? Stanford scholar explains

Over recent months, tech companies have been laying workers off by the thousands. It is estimated that in 2022 alone, over 120,000 people have been dismissed from their job at some of the biggest players in tech – Meta, (Open link)

How Company Culture Shapes Employee Motivation

It doesn’t happen by accident. (Open link)

How to put machine learning models into production | Hacker News

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How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integr (Open link)

Online education by Particular Software

Skip to main content Online education by Particular Software Toggle menu MENU Welcome Back! EMAIL PASSWORD REMEMBER ME Forgot Password? If you are a human, ignore this field SIGN IN Create a new account HOME SUPPOR (Open link)

pytudes/Probability.ipynb at main · norvig/pytudes · GitHub

Python programs, usually short, of considerable difficulty, to perfect particular skills. - pytudes/Probability.ipynb at main · norvig/pytudes (Open link)

Convey

2022 February 01 16:21 stuartscott 1473754¤ 1240149¤ You may have noticed that the January edition of the Convey Digest looks a little different from the previous ones - the color scheme is now based on the dominant (Open link)

How To Be Successful

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up... (Open link)

The Yoda of Silicon Valley - The New York Times

For half a century, the Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth, who bears a slight resemblance to Yoda — albeit standing 6-foot-4 and wearing glasses — has reigned as the spirit-guide of the algorithmic realm. He is th (Open link)

Java Libraries You Can't Afford To Miss

JAVA LIBRARIES YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO MISS ANDRES ALMIRAY @AALMIRAY ANDRESALMIRAY.COM (Open link)

Embracing Virtual Threads

Level up your Java code and explore what Spring can do for you. (Open link)

Meiklejohn and DoorDash Use Fault Injection to Improve Reliability

With millions of users and one of the most sophisticated microservice-driven platforms today, Doordash was the perfect testing ground for an automated resilience testing tool developed by Meiklejohn, and members of the C (Open link)

iOS and iPadOS 16: The MacStories Overview

iPadOS 16. At its keynote held earlier today online and, for a limited audience of developers and media, in Cupertino, Apple unveiled the next major versions of iOS and iPadOS: iOS 16 and iPadOS 16. Both OSes will be rel (Open link)

MAY 23 AT 11:20 PM

Official Post from Simon Evans, but digitally. (Open link)

When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done

A step by step guide for solving a difficult organizational problem, including notes on single stack ranks, team interdependencies, building consensus, reducing work in progress, and how to move your company towards bett (Open link)

Reality TV Has Become a Parody of Itself | WIRED

In 2008, showbiz satire 30 Rock aired an episode called “MILF Island.” Poking fun at how tawdry reality television can be, it follows network honcho Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) as he gloats about his newest hit, a realit (Open link)

Jazz Is Freedom | Paul Grimstad

Thelonious Monk had a gift for reconciling musical experiment with the immediacy of pop. (Open link)

The Go Programming Language and Environment

Credit: Andrij Borys Associates; Renee French (CC by 3.0) Go is a programming language created at Google in late 2007 and released as open source in November 2009. Since then, it has operated as a public project, wi (Open link)

Stanford Lecture: Don Knuth - Twintrees, Baxter Permutations, and Floorplans (2022) - YouTube

Donald Knuth’s Annual Christmas Tree Lectures are back! 🌲✨ This year Dr. Knuth will present on Twintrees, Baxter Permutations, and Floorplans. Three fascina... (Open link)

Starting your Computer Music Journey with Clojure and Overtone in Emacs

In this post I want to write about probably the most powerful text editor there is: Emacs and how to set it up so you can begin programming and live coding with Overtone in no time. Many users would disagree and argue th (Open link)

Psychology Reveals 10 Behaviors of Cynical People

Cynical people often display these ten negative behaviors. Let these serve as an early warning about the person you're dealing with. (Open link)

Top 10 Architecture Characteristics / Non-Functional Requirements with Cheatsheet | by Love Sharma | Jun, 2022 | Dev Genius

Imagine you are buying a car. What essential features do you need in it? A vehicle should deliver a person from point A to point B. But what we also check in it is Safety, Comfort, Maintainability… (Open link)

What's in a Good Error Message?

In a way, an error message tells a story; and as with every good story, you need to establish some context about its general settings. For an error message, this should tell the recipient what the code in question was tr (Open link)

Understanding Monorepos

Everything you need to know about monorepos, and the tools to build them. (Open link)

How to Get Into SRE – Alice Goldfuss

My personal guide. (Open link)

GPS

Interactive article explaining how GPS works. (Open link)

Visualize and create your serverless workloads with AWS Application Composer | AWS Compute Blog

This post is written by Luca Mezzalira, Principal Specialist Solutions Architect. Today, AWS is launching a preview of AWS Application Composer, a visual designer that you can use to build your serverless applica (Open link)

(Open link)

Why Is Dad So Mad?

A father dares to explore his rage. (Open link)

https://twitter.com/alexelcu/status/1530117270453817347

(Open link)

building a modern home - Johnny Rodgers

Personal site of Johnny Rodgers, technology designer from Vancouver. (Open link)

Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale

In 2019, to meet growth and availability challenges, we set a plan in motion to improve our tooling and ability to partition relational databases. (Open link)

How to Play Better Games in the Metagame of Life

Vewing life as a game not only makes life a lot more fun, but it gives you tremendous insight into the human condition. (Open link)

Bottlenecks of Scaleups

A collection of articles on common problems startups face when scaling. 16 March 2022 Tim Cochran, Carl Nygard, and Roni Smith Accumulation of tech debt; experiments and shortcuts are core components Thro (Open link)

Power Up Your Team with Nonviolent Communication Principles

Ann Mehl and Jerry Colonna coach startups to communicate more clearly. These are the quick tips they've seen make a huge impact. (Open link)

How to break a Monolith into Microservices

Decouple Capability and not Code Whenever developers want to extract a service out of an existing system, they have two ways to go about it: extract code or rewrite capability. Often by default the service extr (Open link)

A Senior Engineer's CheckList

Checklist for success of a senior engineer (Open link)

How To Play Better Games In The Metagame Of Life

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AUJAZ6L8DkE" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe> <iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/ (Open link)

Failure Modes and Continuous Resilience

A resilient system continues to operate successfully in the presence of failures. There are many possible failure modes, and each exercises a different aspect of resilience. The system needs to… (Open link)

(Open link)

CRISP: Critical Path Analysis for Microservice Architectures

Uber’s backend is an exemplar of microservice architecture. Each microservice is a small, individually deployable program performing a specific business logic (operation). The microservice architecture is a type of distr (Open link)

On Sarcasm - boz.com

I first discovered sarcasm as a freshman in college, which I realize makes me a bit of a late bloomer as far as teenagers go. There were certain classmates who seemed to always come across as clever and funny no matter t (Open link)

Testing in Production, the safe way

In this post, I hope to explore different forms of “testing in production”, when each form of testing is the most beneficial as well as how to test services in production in a safe way. However… (Open link)

The Hedonistic Imperative: Table Of Contents

how biotechnology will abolish suffering (Open link)

How to compare two systems

A common situation we all face during a project is when we should compare two alternatives, for example, the most common for me is during performance analysis. Usual situations could range from evaluating the improvement (Open link)

VPE and CTO - the first 90 days –

I put this mind map together a few years ago after a discussion about what a new VP of Engineering or CTO should think about in their first 90 days in a new role. It’s a map of the areas I believe every new technical le (Open link)

Most Useful Software Architecture Patterns

The layered architecture pattern is one of the most common patterns. The idea behind a Layered pattern is that components with the same functionalities will be organized into horizontal layers. As a… (Open link)

https://www.macstories.net/stories/watchos-9-the-macstories-review/

As we enter the ninth iteration of watchOS, I must admit that I sometimes find myself looking back wistfully on the computer watch that the Apple Watch once was. My inner tech nerd misses the wild, blind shots at digital (Open link)

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol15/p3535-gaffney.pdf

(Open link)

What does it mean to listen on a port?

This story explores some concepts in computer networking, inspired by Michael Nielsen’s idea of discovery fiction. Code samples can also be found in this repo. Excerpts use openbsd-flavoured netcat on Debian Linux; behvi (Open link)

Evidence that life flashes before the eyes upon death | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout Evidence that life flashes before the eyes upon death (hyperallergic.com) 226 points by relaunched 8 days ago | flag | hide | (Open link)

The Apple Watch got me hooked on mechanical watches

I never thought I’d be a watch person. (Or that I’d wear blue shorts.) I didn’t need a watch. I had a phone and a computer to tell me the time. But I got the Apple Watch on day one, because I’m a responsible iPhone app (Open link)

Beyond Microservices: Streams, State and Scalability

Gwen Shapira talks about how microservices evolved in the last few years, based on experience gained while working with companies using Apache Kafka to update their application architecture. (Open link)

Failure Modes and Continuous Resilience - adrian cockcroft - Medium

A resilient system continues to operate successfully in the presence of failures. There are many possible failure modes, and each exercises a different aspect of resilience. The system needs to… (Open link)

Manhattan Phoenix review: epic history of how New York was forged by fire – and water | Books | The Guardian

Daniel Levy pins the great fire of 1835 as the birth event of modern Manhattan in a tale as teeming as the city itself (Open link)

Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked (Documentary) - YouTube

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for fair use for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, tea... (Open link)

Journeys in Java, Level 5: Building an Empire of Microservices

We continue building our microservices system by adding a coordination layer to handle spinning multiple services up and down. (Open link)

Overview of Kafka Architecture

An introduction to Kafka's architecture and the design mechanics that support Kafka's powerful, real-time data streaming and integration features. (Open link)

Fractal Tasks and the Journey through the Forest of the Infinite.

Creative and open-ended tasks, new features to a product, and research tasks seem like they should be simple. You think of a goal, you start your work, and with a lot of effort, you will be… (Open link)

A career ending mistake — Bitfield Consulting

As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers? (Open link)

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

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The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin

There are so many brilliant posts on GPT-3, demonstrating what it can do, pondering its consequences, vizualizing how it works. With all these out there, it still took a crawl through several papers (Open link)

😵‍💫 Why billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

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Authorization in a Microservices World | Hacker News

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On Call Shouldn’t Suck: A Guide For Managers

https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy/status/1309604622554640384 There are few engineering topics that provoke as much heated commentary as oncall. Everybody has a strong opinion. So let me say straight up that there are few if (Open link)

Tracing the path of network traffic in Kubernetes

Learn how packets flow inside and outside a Kubernetes cluster. Starting from the initial web request and down to the container hosting the application (Open link)

‎trout.me.uk/lisp/vlist.pdf

(Open link)

A Complete Guide To Mechanical Keyboards

In this article, we dive into the possibilities of mechanical keyboards. The different layouts, switch types and even keycap material. Strap yourself in — this will be a deep dive! (Open link)

Orion Magazine - On Memory and Survival

I could blame it on a lot of things. On my education, or lack thereof, on the reasons why I still can’t spell worth a damn. (Open link)

Nobody Knows How to Watch Movies Anymore

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My Obsidian workflow - mnml's vault - Obsidian Publish

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Creating Lock Screen Widgets for Specific Notes via the Apple Notes URL Scheme - MacStories

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How we built a highly scalable distributed state machine

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Optimizing Distributed Joins: The Case of Google Cloud Spanner and DataStax Astra DB | by DataStax | Building the Open Data Stack | Medium

In this post, learn how relational and NoSQL databases, Google Cloud Spanner and DataStax Astra DB, optimize distributed joins for real-time applications. Distributed joins are commonly considered to… (Open link)

The Secrets Of Happiness

+Guest Posts: Movie Wisdom By Guest Writer Mary Tabor—Issue #10 (Open link)

Mechanical Watch – Bartosz Ciechanowski

In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical wa (Open link)

IDE Nostalgia – David Maynard: Software Artist

The 150 year old device that made a 50 year old Integrated Development Environment (IDE) rock Engelbart keyset: One handed chorded keyboard Photograph @Richard Mark courtesy of Computer (Open link)

Evernote Web

(Open link)

An Enthusiast’s Deep Dive Into Mechanical Keyboard Switches

A comprehensive guide to mechanical keyboard switches. It's time to fall deep into the rabbit hole. (Open link)

Authorization in a microservices world | Alexander's Blog

Authorization? How hard can it be? I am pretty sure that others have already solved it. We are not the first ones doing microservices. It should be easy to integrate what's already out there. (Open link)

Structural Lessons in Engineering Management

Software engineers are attracted to formulas, algorithms, and structures. As people whose job it is to take ideas and turn them into predictable executable code, it is unsurprising that we’re drawn… (Open link)

Effect of different nap opportunity durations on short-term maximal performance, attention, feelings, muscle soreness, fatigue, stress and sleep

The aim of the present study was to determine the effect of different nap opportunity durations on short-term maximal performance, attention, feelings, muscle soreness, fatigue, stress and sleep. Twenty physically active (Open link)

Why will 2022 be the year of DevTools 2.0

Recent changes in devtools show that we are approaching a new era. Here's my predictions on how DevTools 2.0 will evolve in 2022. (Open link)

Guide to the Volatile Keyword in Java

Learn about the Java volatile keyword and its capabilities. (Open link)

https://rust-book.cs.brown.edu/

Welcome to the Rust Book experiment, and thank you for your participation! First, we want to introduce you to the new mechanics of this experiment. The main mechanic is quizzes: each page has a few quizzes about the pag (Open link)

https://vickiboykis.com/2022/12/05/the-cloudy-layers-of-modern-day-programming/

Is what we do development anymore? (Open link)

resilience-engineering/intro.md at master · lorin/resilience-engineering · GitHub

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Inconsistent thoughts on database consistency

In this post, understand the different concepts of consistency as applied to distributed databases, as well as some issues with the conversation of consistency. (Open link)

https://okt.to/Ht4Umq

(Open link)

7 days ago

This article has a large gap in the story: it ignores sensor data sources, which are both the highest velocity and highest volume data models by multiple orders of magnitude. They have become ubiquitous in diverse, mediu (Open link)

A Taxonomy of Video Game Difficulty

When someone tells you that a particular video game (like Elden Ring) is hard, it can be tough to figure out what they might mean by that because games are hard in different ways. As Tolstoy might have said had he been a (Open link)

The 40 Best Questions to Ask in an Interview — How to Go Deeper Than “What’s the Culture Like?”

Candidates need to sidestep common interview questions. Here are the best questions to ask in an interview. (Open link)

Top Programming Languages 2022 - IEEE Spectrum

Python’s still No. 1, but employers love to see SQL skills (Open link)

Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure

Software systems are increasingly based on data, rather than code. And a new class of tools and technologies have emerged to process data for both analytics and operational AI/ ML. (Open link)

How to design better APIs

15 language-agnostic, actionable tips on REST API design. (Open link)

LinkedIn

0 notifications total (Open link)

Data Caching Across Microservices in a Serverless Architecture

Organizations are re-architecting their traditional monolithic applications to incorporate microservices. This helps them gain agility and scalability and accelerate time-to-market for new features. Each microser (Open link)

How to Work with Emotions

Sharon Salzberg, Judith Simmer-Brown, John Tarrant, and Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche discuss skillful and unskillful involvement with emotions, offering new perspectives on how to think about and engage with our emotional li (Open link)

What Makes a Senior Engineer? Writing Software vs Building Systems

Join the heated discussion about this article on Hacker News 🔥 Junior Engineers care about writing Software. They value code quality, employ best pra (Open link)

alexandru/scala-best-practices: A collection of Scala best practices

A collection of Scala best practices. Contribute to alexandru/scala-best-practices development by creating an account on GitHub. (Open link)

What's in a Good Error Message? - Gunnar Morling

In a way, an error message tells a story; and as with every good story, you need to establish some context about its general settings. For an error message, this should tell the recipient what the code in question was tr (Open link)

dbms_cloud_metric_sql_pkg.sql

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. (Open link)

Fitting Presto to Large-Scale Apache Kafka at Uber

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Building Resilient Organizations

Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis (Open link)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31839260

Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login Infrastructure SaaS – a control plane first architecture (thenile.dev) 56 points by infra_dev 4 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments (Open link)

Java sockets I/O: blocking, non-blocking and asynchronous

(Open link)

Flow

Be water, my friend (Open link)

6.824 Schedule: Spring 2021

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Beyond Microservices: Streams, State and Scalability

Gwen Shapira talks about how microservices evolved in the last few years, based on experience gained while working with companies using Apache Kafka to update their application architecture. (Open link)

Container Networking Is Simple!

How container networking works under the hood? Setting up docker-like container networking from scratch. Bonus: podman rootless container networking explained. (Open link)

Making Code Faster

[This fragment is available in an audio version.] I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code wi (Open link)

How to Talk about Consistency and Isolation in Distributed DBs

The SQL standard defines isolation levels, but we don't have a great vocabulary for talking about consistency levels, and how these two things interact. (Open link)

Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong

Oct 3, 2014 Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it (Open link)

CUPID—for joyful coding

What started as lighthearted iconoclasm, poking at the bear of SOLID, has developed into something more concrete and tangible. If I do not think the SOLID principles are useful these days, then what would I replace them (Open link)

The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals

Uncover the key differences between amateurs and professionals that make a difference and improve the prospects of success. (Open link)

The Go libraries that never failed us: 22 libraries you need to know

Did you have a situation when you lost a ton of time finding a Go library for your need? In theory, you can check lists like Awesome Go or make a choice based on GitHub stars. But Awesome Go contains over 2600 libraries, (Open link)

STT e27 - My Embarrassing Google Interview - YouTube

I tell the sad but kinda funny tale of how I basically failed my first Google interview. (Open link)

My top 25 items in a senior engineer’s checklist

This is a simple checklist, and while it is useful to any software engineer, it is especially useful to senior engineers. More items from the list can be found here. (Open link)

https://link.oreilly.com/Uptq0HS0WM0FrR00JQ000L6

(Open link)

A pretty shitty time?

Watch now (3 min) | No, I've always been good enough. (Open link)

How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code

When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I can quickly train a person to have knowledge (Open link)

Blog Theme - Details

Click to view our Accessibility Policy Skip to content Oracle Search Menu Resources for About Careers Developers Investors Partners Startups Why Oracle Analyst Reports Best CRM Cloud Economics Corporate Responsibility Di (Open link)

BBC Online — A year with serverless | by Johnathan Ishmael | BBC Product & Technology | Mar, 2022 | Medium

In this post I reflect on our progress so far, and some of the interesting challenges we are facing while building the BBC’s critical digital services. If you’re a technology builder, interested in… (Open link)

Health, Availability, Debuggability - Observability+ - Medium

As we collect various observability signals from systems, it fosters a new conversation around the classification of the signals. There is a significant discussion on observability signals and even… (Open link)

🌱 My blog is a digital garden, not a blog

The phrase "digital garden" is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting "showpiece" and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there. While not everybody has or (Open link)

#rC3 - What have we lost? - YouTube

https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-channels-2020-20-what-have-we-lost-We have ended up in a world where UNIX and Windows have taken over, and most people have never ... (Open link)

https://twitter.com/MrEchs/status/1516024322409832450

(Open link)

The year of the Cloud Development Environment – James Governor's Monkchips

So 2023 is the year of the cloud development environment (CDE). That’s like one of the longest running jokes in tech- it’s the year of Linux on the desktop. Or maybe we’re finally approaching the time that a cloud-first (Open link)

Merlin's Wisdom Project

Merlin Mann attempts to capture the best advice he's heard and learned from. - wisdom/wisdom.md at master · merlinmann/wisdom (Open link)

Build Your Own Text Editor (2017) | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (195) | logout Build Your Own Text Editor (2017) (viewsourcecode.org) 167 points by Tomte 10 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 18 (Open link)

How to organize yourself as a solo founder | Hacker News

Hacker News new | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit hanlec (194) | logout How to organize yourself as a solo founder (medium.com/jeel_shah) 135 points by gekkostate 9 hours ago | flag | hide | past | (Open link)

Data on the Outside vs. Data on the Inside - ACM Queue

August 2, 2020 Pat Helland Recently, there has been a lot of interest in services. These can be microservices or just services. In each case, the service provides a function with its own code and data, and opera (Open link)

Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure

Software systems are increasingly based on data, rather than code. A new class of tools and technologies have emerged to process data for both analytics and ML. (Open link)

12 Ways to Improve Your Monolith Before Transitioning to Microservices

Like tidying up a house before a total renovation, preparing your monolith is the first step towards transitioning to microservices. (Open link)

Our Journey with Quarkus - IBM Blog

Quarkus truly appears to be the smartest possible solution, in our experience. (Open link)

How to present to executives. | Irrational Exuberance

Have you presented to company executives about a key engineering initiative, walking into the room excited and leaving defeated? Maybe you only made it to your second slide before unrelated questions derailed the discuss (Open link)

The World's Most Satisfying Checkbox | (Not Boring) Software

The Art of Game Feel (a.k.a Juice) in Product Design (Open link)

https://quillandpad.com/2022/02/26/for-the-sake-of-sake-a-primer-with-tasting-notes-reprise/

Basically, sake comprises rice, water, and the fermenting agent called koji, resulting in an alcoholic level that usually sits between 13 and 16 percent. And you might be interested to know that the rice used is differen (Open link)

https://programmerweekly.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=72f68dcee17c92724bc7822fb&id=c6a9958764&e=d7c3968f32

Ever since I started to work on the Apache APISIX project, I’ve been trying to improve my knowledge and understanding of REST RESTful HTTP APIs. For this, I’m reading and watching the following sources: Books. At the mom (Open link)

7 Mental Models For Great Engineering Leadership | Athenian

A handful of mental models that, when combined, will provide a clear understanding of what is required to be a great engineering leader at different stages of your company. (Open link)

How to create a more effective homepage

A step-by-step guide on improving your homepage content & copy to increase conversion (Open link)

Go Doc Comments - The Go Programming Language

“Doc comments” are comments that appear immediately before top-level package, const, func, type, and var declarations with no intervening newlines. Every exported (capitalized) name should have a doc comment. The go/doc (Open link)

Cracking the Docker CLI: How to Grasp Container Management Commands

When you are new to Docker, the number of commands to study might be truly overwhelming. This article shows a way to internalize the most important Docker commands without the brute-force memorization. (Open link)

Things to know about engineering levels

I have begun to notice a common blind spot among engineers who are frustrated about leveling up, which is: not every opportunity exists at every company at every time (Open link)

Facing the Struggle

"Parkinson’s disease is the gift that keeps on taking. But it truly has been a gift." - Michael J. Fox (Open link)

Why You May Need a Data Mesh

A data mesh architecture is a decentralized approach that enables domain teams to perform cross-domain data analysis on their own. (Open link)

Seth Godin - How to Get Your Ideas to Spread - Nordic Business Forum - YouTube

Seth Godin, the world-renowned marketing and leadership author inspires us on how to get our ideas spread when mass marketing and traditional advertising hav... (Open link)

Reproducible Builds in Java

Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices that create an independently-verifiable path from source to binary code.https://reproducible-builds.org/Reproducible builds are important and provide benefi (Open link)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.02955.pdf

(Open link)

The Four Innovation Phases of Netflix’s Trillions Scale Real-time Data Infrastructure | by Zhenzhong Xu | Feb, 2022 | Medium

The blog post will share the four phases of Real-time Data Infrastructure’s iterative journey in Netflix (2015-2021). For each phase, we will go over the evolving business motivations, the team’s unique challenges, the (Open link)

https://jvns.ca/blog/things-your-manager-might-not-know/

Things your manager might not know (Open link)